Weather Radar Polarimetry

This book presents the fundamentals of polarimetric radar remote sensing through understanding wave scattering and propagation in geophysical media filled with hydrometers and other objects. The text characterizes the physical, statistical, and electromagnetic properties of hydrometers and establishes the relations between radar observables and physical state parameters. It introduces advanced remote sensing techniques (such as polarimetric phased array radar) and retrieval methods for physical parameters. The book also illustrates applications of polarimetric radar measurements in hydrometer classification, particle size distribution retrievals, microphysical parameterization, and weather quantification and forecast.

This monograph offers a wide array of contemporary information on weather radar polarimetry and its applications. The book tightly connects the microphysical processes responsible for the development and evolution of the clouds’ bulk physical properties to the polarimetric variables, and contains the procedures on how to simulate realistic polarimetric variables. With up-to-date polarimetric methodologies and applications, the book will appeal to practicing radar meteorologists, hydrologists, microphysicists, and modelers who are interested in the bulk properties of hydrometeors and quantification of these with the goals to improve precipitation measurements, understanding of precipitation processes, or model forecasts.

This 2001 book provides a detailed introduction to the principles of Doppler and polarimetric radar, focusing in particular on their use in the analysis of weather systems. The design features and operation of practical radar systems are highlighted throughout the book in order to illustrate important theoretical foundations. The authors begin by discussing background topics such as electromagnetic scattering, polarization, and wave propagation. They then deal in detail with the engineering aspects of pulsed Doppler polarimetric radar, including the relevant signal theory, spectral estimation techniques, and noise considerations. They close by examining a range of key applications in meteorology and remote sensing. The book will be of great use to graduate students of electrical engineering and atmospheric science as well as to practitioners involved in the applications of polarimetric radar systems.

This monograph offers a wide array of contemporary information on weather radar polarimetry and its applications. The book tightly connects the microphysical processes responsible for the development and evolution of the clouds' bulk physical properties to the polarimetric variables, and contains the procedures on how to simulate realistic polarimetric variables. With up-to-date polarimetric methodologies and applications, the book will appeal to practicing radar meteorologists, hydrologists, microphysicists, and modelers who are interested in the bulk properties of hydrometeors and quantification of these with the goals to improve precipitation measurements, understanding of precipitation processes, or model forecasts.

This open access book focuses on the practical application of electromagnetic polarimetry principles in Earth remote sensing with an educational purpose. In the last decade, the operations from fully polarimetric synthetic aperture radar such as the Japanese ALOS/PalSAR, the Canadian Radarsat-2 and the German TerraSAR-X and their easy data access for scientific use have developed further the research and data applications at L,C and X band. As a consequence, the wider distribution of polarimetric data sets across the remote sensing community boosted activity and development in polarimetric SAR applications, also in view of future missions. Numerous experiments with real data from spaceborne platforms are shown, with the aim of giving an up-to-date and complete treatment of the unique benefits of fully polarimetric synthetic aperture radar data in five different domains: forest, agriculture, cryosphere, urban and oceans.

This book presents the fundamentals of polarimetric radar remote sensing through understanding wave scattering and propagation in geophysical media filled with hydrometers and other objects. The text characterizes the physical, statistical, and electromagnetic properties of hydrometers and establishes the relations between radar observables and physical state parameters. It introduces advanced remote sensing techniques (such as polarimetric phased array radar) and retrieval methods for physical parameters. The book also illustrates applications of polarimetric radar measurements in hydrometer classification, particle size distribution retrievals, microphysical parameterization, and weather quantification and forecast.

Weather radar is a vital instrument for observing the atmosphere to help provide weather forecasts and issue weather warnings to the public. The current Next Generation Weather Radar (NEXRAD) system provides Doppler radar coverage to most regions of the United States (NRC, 1995). This network was designed in the mid 1980s and deployed in the 1990s as part of the National Weather Service (NWS) modernization (NRC, 1999). Since the initial design phase of the NEXRAD program, considerable advances have been made in radar technologies and in the use of weather radar for monitoring and prediction. The development of new technologies provides the motivation for appraising the status of the current weather radar system and identifying the most promising approaches for the development of its eventual replacement. The charge to the committee was to determine the state of knowledge regarding ground-based weather surveillance radar technology and identify the most promising approaches for the design of the replacement for the present Doppler Weather Radar. This report presents a first look at potential approaches for future upgrades to or replacements of the current weather radar system. The need, and schedule, for replacing the current system has not been established, but the committee used the briefings and deliberations to assess how the current system satisfies the current and emerging needs of the operational and research communities and identified potential system upgrades for providing improved weather forecasts and warnings. The time scale for any total replacement of the system (20- to 30-year time horizon) precluded detailed investigation of the designs and cost structures associated with any new weather radar system. The committee instead noted technologies that could provide improvements over the capabilities of the evolving NEXRAD system and recommends more detailed investigation and evaluation of several of these technologies. In the course of its deliberations, the committee developed a sense that the processes by which the eventual replacement radar system is developed and deployed could be as significant as the specific technologies adopted. Consequently, some of the committee's recommendations deal with such procedural issues.

This practical textbook introduces the fundamental physics behind radar measurements, to guide students and practitioners in the proper interpretation of radar reflectivity, Doppler velocity and dual-polarization imagery. Operational applications are explored, such as how radar imagery can be used to analyze and forecast convective and widespread weather systems. The book concludes with an overview of current research topics, including the study of clouds and precipitation using radars, signal processing, and data assimilation. Numerous full-color illustrations are included, as well as problem sets, case studies, and a variety of supplementary electronic material including animated time sequences of images to help convey complex concepts. This book is a valuable resource for advanced undergraduate and graduate students in radar meteorology and other related courses, such as precipitation microphysics and dynamics. It will also make a useful reference for researchers, professional meteorologists and hydrologists.

The recent launches of three fully polarimetric synthetic aperture radar (PolSAR) satellites have shown that polarimetric radar imaging can provide abundant data on the Earth’s environment, such as biomass and forest height estimation, snow cover mapping, glacier monitoring, and damage assessment. Written by two of the most recognized leaders in this field, Polarimetric Radar Imaging: From Basics to Applications presents polarimetric radar imaging and processing techniques and shows how to develop remote sensing applications using PolSAR imaging radar. The book provides a substantial and balanced introduction to the basic theory and advanced concepts of polarimetric scattering mechanisms, speckle statistics and speckle filtering, polarimetric information analysis and extraction techniques, and applications typical to radar polarimetric remote sensing. It explains the importance of wave polarization theory and the speckle phenomenon in the information retrieval problem of microwave imaging and inverse scattering. The authors demonstrate how to devise intelligent information extraction algorithms for remote sensing applications. They also describe more advanced polarimetric analysis techniques for polarimetric target decompositions, polarization orientation effects, polarimetric scattering modeling, speckle filtering, terrain and forest classification, manmade target analysis, and PolSAR interferometry. With sample PolSAR data sets and software available for download, this self-contained, hands-on book encourages you to analyze space-borne and airborne PolSAR and polarimetric interferometric SAR (Pol-InSAR) data and then develop applications using this data.