ATTENUATION CORRECTION AND RAINDROP SIZE DISTRIBUTION WITH DUAL-POLARIZATION RADAR MEASUREMENTS AT KU-BAND

Weather radar signals at high frequencies such as Ku-band are attenuated along the propagation path through rainfall. Hence, reflectivity and differential reflectivity measurements at such frequencies should be corrected for attenuation before any quantitative applications such as the retrieval of raindrop size distribution (DSD), which is a fundamental descriptor of rainfall microphysics. This paper presents the attenuation correction algorithm implemented for NASA Dual-frequency Dual-polarized Doppler Radar (D3R) Ku-band observations. The dual-polarization based correction performance is evaluated with the self-consistency criterion. In addition, the DSD parameters are estimated with the attenuation corrected observations, and the preliminary results are shown.