  Doppler radars are routinely used for the remote sensing of oceanic surface
currents and atmospheric wind profiles. Even though they operate at different
frequencies and address different media, they follow very similar processing
for the extraction of measured velocities. In particular they both face the
challenging issue of capturing geophysical phenomena which vary rapidly with
respect to the typical integration time. Recently, the authors applied a
non-spectral formalism based on autoregressive processes to model the
backscattered time series obtained from High-Frequency oceanic radars. They
showed that it allows to calculate Doppler spectra for very short integration
times without losing in frequency resolution nor signal-to-noise ratio. We
apply this technique to synthetic and experimental data within a common
framework and show for the first time the strong potential of the method for
the study of transient atmospheric phenomena.
