Evaluation of Attenuation Correction Methodology for Dual-Polarization Radars: Application to X-Band Systems

Monitoring of precipitation using high-frequency radar systems, such as the X band, is becoming increasingly popular because of their lower cost compared to their S-band counterpart. However, at higher frequencies, such as the X band, the precipitation-induced attenuation is significant, and introduces ambiguities in the interpretation of the radar observations. Differential phase measurements have been shown to be very useful for correcting the measured reflectivity for precipitation-induced attenuation. This paper presents a quantitative evaluation of two attenuation correction methodologies with specific emphasis on the X band. A simple differential phase–based algorithm as well as the range-profiling algorithm are studied. The impact of backscatter differential phase on the performance of attenuation correction is evaluated. It is shown that both of the algorithms for attenuation correction work fairly well, yielding attenuation-accurate corrected reflectivities with a negligible bias.