Simulated Calibrators Based Polarimetric Weather Radar External Calibration

Abstract

As a potential tool for atmospheric observation, weather radar has shown good performance in providing abundant meteorological data during a short time. The key to use weather radar is that the collected data should have sufficient accuracy. To achieve this purpose, weather radar external calibration technique is proposed and applied for practical data processing, which is usually performed based on the deployed calibrators. However, because of the environment of calibration field is complicated and the scheme is difficult to operate, traditional deployed calibrator based methods have several limitations. In this paper, the novel low-cost and repeatable simulated calibrators based weather radar external calibration technology is proposed. Experimental results show that in the single-polarized mode, the proposed method can recover the reflectivity factor accurately from noisy echo data. While in the dual-polarized mode, the crosstalk and channel imbalance can be estimated and compensated successfully by the proposed method.