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<front>
<journal-meta>
<journal-id journal-id-type="publisher">EGUsphere</journal-id>
<journal-title-group>
<journal-title>EGUsphere</journal-title>
<abbrev-journal-title abbrev-type="publisher">EGUsphere</abbrev-journal-title>
<abbrev-journal-title abbrev-type="nlm-ta">EGUsphere</abbrev-journal-title>
</journal-title-group>
<issn pub-type="epub"></issn>
<publisher><publisher-name>Copernicus Publications</publisher-name>
<publisher-loc>Göttingen, Germany</publisher-loc>
</publisher>
</journal-meta>
<article-meta>
<article-id pub-id-type="doi">10.5194/egusphere-2026-415</article-id>
<title-group>
<article-title>Radar Data Smoothing using the Discrete Cosine Transform: A Fast Spectral Domain Algorithm</article-title>
</title-group>
<contrib-group><contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Valdivia</surname>
<given-names>Jairo M.</given-names>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff1">
<sup>1</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
<contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Chapman</surname>
<given-names>Will</given-names>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff1">
<sup>1</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
<contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Friedrich</surname>
<given-names>Katja</given-names>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff1">
<sup>1</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
</contrib-group><aff id="aff1">
<label>1</label>
<addr-line>Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences, University of Colorado Boulder, Boulder, CO, USA</addr-line>
</aff>
<pub-date pub-type="epub">
<day>27</day>
<month>02</month>
<year>2026</year>
</pub-date>
<volume>2026</volume>
<fpage>1</fpage>
<lpage>16</lpage>
<permissions>
<copyright-statement>Copyright: &#x000a9; 2026 Jairo M. Valdivia et al.</copyright-statement>
<copyright-year>2026</copyright-year>
<license license-type="open-access">
<license-p>This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. To view a copy of this licence, visit <ext-link ext-link-type="uri"  xlink:href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/</ext-link></license-p>
</license>
</permissions>
<self-uri xlink:href="https://egusphere.copernicus.org/preprints/2026/egusphere-2026-415/">This article is available from https://egusphere.copernicus.org/preprints/2026/egusphere-2026-415/</self-uri>
<self-uri xlink:href="https://egusphere.copernicus.org/preprints/2026/egusphere-2026-415/egusphere-2026-415.pdf">The full text article is available as a PDF file from https://egusphere.copernicus.org/preprints/2026/egusphere-2026-415/egusphere-2026-415.pdf</self-uri>
<abstract>
<p>This study introduces a computationally efficient and methodologically robust approach for smoothing radar data using the Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT). Traditional spatial convolution methods for noise reduction in polar coordinates suffer from geometric inconsistencies and prohibitive computational costs, particularly when implementing range-dependent dynamic kernels to maintain physical scale. We propose a spectral-domain alternative that utilizes the convolution theorem to perform equivalent smoothing operations. By deriving analytical transfer functions for various kernels&amp;mdash;including Boxcar, Gaussian, and Savitzky-Golay&amp;mdash;we demonstrate that the DCT method achieves identical performance to spatial convolution while effectively handling boundary conditions. Performance benchmarks on real C-band weather radar data reveal that the DCT-based approach offers speedup factors exceeding 800 times for large kernel sizes. Furthermore, for large-scale datasets (180 million pixels), equivalent processing time is reduced from over 1 hour to under 18 seconds. The proposed method ensures physically consistent smoothing across ranges, preserving small-scale meteorological features while enabling real-time data quality improvement.</p>
</abstract>
<counts><page-count count="16"/></counts>
<funding-group>
<award-group id="gs1">
<funding-source>National Science Foundation</funding-source>
<award-id>AGS 2114011</award-id>
</award-group>
</funding-group>
</article-meta>
</front>
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<back>
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