I thought I understood radar. You send out a signal, wait for it to bounce off something and come back to you. You know how far away the something is by the time the signal takes to return. Simple stuff.
So I notice that weather radar can show multiple objects (rain showers) with one ‘hiding’ behind another. In other words, let’s say A is your radar source, S1 and S2 are two rain showers:
A . . . . . . . S1 . . . . . . S2 . . . . .
I understand how the radar ‘sees’ S1, but how does it ever find S2? Wasn’t the radar signal bounced back by S1, making S2 impossible to find?
I thought about having multiple radar posts, but looking at the radar weather maps it seems to me you’d have to have one heck of a lot of them to form such a complete and seemingly accurate picture of the rain activity.
IANA Radar Technician, and maybe one will be along shortly. My understanding is that rain, clouds, etc. are not completely opaque to radar like solid objects. When the radar hits S1, part of it bounces back, and the remainder of the signal continues on. When it gets to S2, again part of the signal is reflected back and part continues to S3, etc. By counting the return pulses, and timing the difference between them you can get the location of multiple objects. By measuring the strength of each return pulse you can determine the relative solidity of each object (heavy rain, light rain, snow, etc.).
Traditional pulse radar sends out a short burst of energy and waits for it to come back. In any case it’s rare for a target to return all the energy sent out by the radar transmitter. A portion may be bounced back by one target and a portion by another. Combine that fact with doppler radar which detects relative velocity and more processing of the returned signal and you can get a more graphic image of what is out there. My area of expertise was weapons radar but some of the same principles apply.