India has an extensive network of Doppler Weather Radars (DWRs), including a significant number of coastal DWRs, enabling effective monitoring of weather and coastal systems. The DWR system plays a vital role in meteorology by providing essential 3D volumetric observations of meteorological systems. Numerous studies have been conducted to estimate local wind field from single DWR radial velocity observations. Understanding horizontal winds is crucial as they facilitate the transport of momentum, heat, and humidity within the atmosphere, impacting various meteorological processes. Accurate wind estimation, especially at high spatial and temporal resolutions, is invaluable for identifying severe weather conditions and enhancing regional weather surveillance that can also be integrated into numerical weather prediction models ultimately improving forecasting accuracy. The most commonly used and simplified techniques for retrieving wind profiles from a single-Doppler radar are Velocity Azimuth Display (VAD) and Velocity Volume Processing (VVP). Despite VVP’s advantage of higher spatial resolution than VAD, for small analysis volumes, VVP has issues like an ill-conditioned coefficient matrix, resulting in significant errors.This study introduces a methodology for estimating 3D horizontal winds using SingleDop technique based on variational approach.To validate this approach, the technique is applied to the observations of TERLS C-band polarimetric DWR in Thiruvananthapuram during the 2018 Kerala extreme rainfall from August 12–18. The retrieved horizontal winds successfully captured the profile, however, there are challenges such as DWR-derived wind underestimation and height discrepancies compared to radiosonde data. Such techniques are valuable in retrieving the high-resolution horizontal wind field from DWR.