The 3-POL method applied to polarimetric weather measurements with agile-beam phased array radars

Weather radar technology is continuously evolving in order to provide more accurate predictions and estimates of weather phenomena and events. Research efforts are being focused on improving the radar scanning capabilities, looking for faster data updates and adaptive scanning. With this objective, phased arrays have arised as the candidate to replace the current mechanically steered radars. How the use of phased arrays can affect the estimation of polarimetric and Doppler parameters, which impose quite strict requirements on the purity of the transmitted signal polarization and the isolation between cross-polar channels, when using the 3-POL method is the topic of this paper. For this, how the accuracy of the polarimetric parameters is affected by bias in the transmitting and receiving polarizations, by the proccessing algorithms and by antennas´ radiation patterns will be studied.