Leon Colon, Leyda V

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Department Head: Anthony A. Maciejewski. 2010 Summer. Includes bibliographical references. In the past, single polarized X-band radars were primarily used (along with S-band radars) for hail detection, first by the Russians and then later for the National Hail Research Experiment (NHRE). But X-band radars were not used alone because of the large attenuation at frequencies around 10 GHz and higher, until dual-polarized radars were developed. This fact has brought attention to development and evaluation of correction techniques for rain attenuation in order to exploit the advantages of dual-polarized data. Past developed methods make use of the close relation between the differential propagation phase ΦDP and path attenuation PIA. Their use is known to be successful in rain events, but in the presence of wet ice, these methods are no longer useful because the differential propagation phase is not affected by the isotropic wet ice. This factor was the basis to develop herein two different techniques for estimating the attenuation due to rain and wet ice separately and correct for the wet ice induced attenuation. In this dissertation, two methods are investigated and evaluated. The first method uses the Surface Reference Technique (SRT) α-adjustment method to correct for the attenuation. This method was first developed for the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) precipitation radar. We assume that S-band data is un-attenuated and is used as a reference. The difference in reflectivities at the end of the beam (defined as the average of the last ten gates with 'good' data) is attributed...

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