In order to enhance the sensing power of precipitating clouds, a dual-polarization radar is developed to be added in an active and passive microwave dual-wavelength (X/Ka band) remote sensing system. After this upgrading of dual-polarization function addition, the advanced properties of the principle of the former remote sensing system are augmented. This upgraded system becomes a new capability of synthetically sensing clouds and precipitation, and will play an important role in precipitating cloud structure studies and all kinds of major science projects concerning obtaining quantitative distribution of clouds and precipitation. The working principle, the upgrading method and the specifications of the new system and its main components are given here. An emphasis is laid on the description of the design and implementing means of the antenna-feeding unit, the control unit and data acquisition unit. A preliminary rainfall observation test of the system is also presented in this paper.
An observational method has been proposed to sample echo data with high range resolutions using a ground-based meteorological radar. Utilizing this method, a quantity of rain echo data with a high range resolution of 125 m was obtained by using an X-band meteorological radar. The computation of rain nonuniformity strength using this high resolution radar data shows that the nonuniformity is significant and even in an instantaneous field of view (IFOV) of 1 km, the reflectivity excursion above 10 dB is common. The simulation of the nonuniform beam filling (NUBF) error of the path-averaged rainrate derived from the path-integrated attenuation measured by the spaceborne radar has been also implemented using this data. The results show that the rainrate encounters mainly underestimation and cannot be neglected, even in 0.5 km IFOV, it can reach over 50%. The correlation analyses show that the rainrate error and the true rainrate have a power relationship with some correlation, which might be used to correct this error partially. The simulation also shows that it is very important to use the high resolution data in studying the NUBF error of the next generation spaceborne radar with a higher across beam resolution (e.g. below 3 km).
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