Conventional radars, used for atmospheric remote sensing, usually operate at a single polarization and frequency to estimate storm parameters such as rainfallrate and water content. Because of the high variability of the drop size distribution conventional radars do not succeed in obtaining detailed information because they just use horizontal reflectivity. The potentiality of the dual-polarize...

Polarimetric radar measurements are used to retrieve properties of raindrop distributions. While there has been extensive research conducted on microphysical retrievals such as hydrometeor classification or hail detection, there has not been much research into polarimetric radar based deduction of raindrop shape even though the shape of raindrops plays a critical role in rainfall estimation fro...

Dual polarized weather radars, radars that can transmit both horizontal (H) and vertical (V) polarized waves, are becoming more common in the world. Dual polarization is accomplished via fast alternate transmission of H and V polarization or simultaneous H and V polarization transmission. The simultaneous H and V transmit mode is becoming quite popular since a high power, costly, polarization s...

Among the planned upgrades for the NEXRAD network of weather surveillance radars are superresolution (1/4 km reflectivity and 0.5 deg radials) and polarimetric capabilities. In either case, keeping current update times (i.e., same antenna rotation rates) results in meteorological variable estimators with unacceptable large errors. A family of methods to reduce errors in estimates of spectral mo...

Since the use of differential reflectivity for rainfall estimation was first proposed by Seliga and Bringi (1976), many studies have shown that polarimetric measurements can improve precipitation type classification and quantitative precipitation estimate (Straka et al. 2000). Moreover, the polarimetric radar (PR) upgrade plan of the National Weather Services (NWS) for the operational WSR-88D n...

Classification of hydrometeors has a wide variety of applications such as validation of cloud microphysical models, choice of algorithm for precipitation estimation and evaluation of assumptions made in the precipitation retrieval processes as well as validation of space borne observations. Dual-polarization radar measurements are sensitive to hydrometeors properties such as size, shape, phase ...

Using simultaneous S and Ka band observations it is possible to retrieve a path integrated value of the water vapor content as well as cloud liquid water content values using the atmospheric and liquid water attenuation properties at the two frequencies. Recently the NCAR S-band dual polarimetric (S-Pol) radar has been upgraded to include simultaneous Ka-band radar measurements (Farquharson et ...