When storms close in, it forecasts whether planes can still take off and land; across endless farmland it warns crops of incoming pests; inside dark tunnels it maps the tangle of rock and pipe beneath our feet; and on snow-covered mountains it measures the depth of the drift so surveyors can draw maps that are millimetre-sharp.
Every one of these scenes is quietly powered by radar. In recent years Chinese scientists have developed a family of home-grown radars that serve both national defence and everyday life, quietly reshaping the way we live and work.
Guardian of every journey
Peering through fog when human eyes cannot
For travellers, safety comes first. Acting as a loyal “air-traffic sentry,” radar constantly scans the sky, locking on to every aircraft’s position, speed and heading—even when visibility drops to near zero—giving pilots the data they need to land safely.
At Beijing Daxing International Airport a C-band, fully digital, active phased-array weather radar—the first of its kind in civil aviation—completes a 40-layer volumetric scan in 90 seconds with 75 m spatial resolution. Distributed transmit-receive modules push mean time between failures from 600 h to more than 3 000 h, turning a blanket of fog into a transparent sheet of numbers.
The same “hyper-vision” is now rolling onto the road. By marrying laser, millimetre-wave and optical cameras with AI-driven decision, path-planning and scene-simulation algorithms, self-driving cars can see far beyond the human horizon, receiving instant alerts for road works, red-light runners, crossing traffic or pedestrians hidden behind parked trucks.
“We have also built an ultrasonic radar that watches the 0–10 m bubble around the vehicle,” says a Chinese engineer. “It complements millimetre-wave and lidar to create a layered safety cocoon, and it handles door-collision avoidance, wading-depth checks and automatic parking. So far we have shipped 20 million units.”
First responder when disaster looms
Counting a locust’s wingbeats from kilometres away
China’s new meteorological radars—S-band dual-polarisation phased arrays, C-band phased arrays and the rest of the family—can sniff out a storm cell while it is still forming and push warnings to phones and control towers minutes earlier than before.
But radar is more than a weather eye; it is also X-ray vision. Ground-penetrating radar (GPR) works non-destructively, delivering centimetre-sharp images of what lies beneath, whether the job is checking a tunnel lining, mapping bedrock, inspecting a dam or hunting for a sinkhole under a city street.
When earthquakes crumble buildings, life-rescue radar sends ultra-wideband pulses through the rubble; the faint reflections of breathing or a heartbeat are pulled from the chaos and converted into life signs on a screen, guiding rescuers to survivors within the golden hour.
Farmers, too, have a new ally. Conventional pest scouting means walking the rows with a net and a notebook—slow and always too late. China’s first high-resolution, multi-band, full-polarisation entomological radar now stares skyward every night, measuring an insect’s wing-beat frequency, body length, weight, radar cross-section and even head orientation. The result is the first national database of migratory pest trajectories, laying the technical groundwork for a country-wide early-warning platform that can tell farmers “spray tomorrow” before a single moth lands.
Where radar is heading
Smarter, multi-band, and—quite possibly—quantum
Tomorrow’s radars will fuse artificial intelligence with radio physics in real time. Deep-learning networks will sift through raw echoes, instantly labelling every contact—freighter, stealth drone, flock of birds—and predicting what each will do next, while cognitive engines re-tune waveforms on the fly to stay one step ahead of jamming.
In the lab, quantum and terahertz radars are moving from chalkboard to prototype. A quantum-entanglement radar built in Nanjing has already recognised a stealth target’s quantum signature at 200 km. Once mature, such sets could rewrite the rules of naval warfare and coastal defence.
From the stratosphere to the seafloor, radar has become both shield and sensor for a modern China. As the technology keeps sprinting toward greater autonomy, wider spectra and quantum horizons, the next chapter of radar is being written today—and it will be even closer to daily life than we can imagine.
(Article source: Published in People's Daily)
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