Detection and Mitigation of Second-Trip Echo in Polarimetric Weather Radar Employing Random Phase Coding

This study presents a new identification and mitigation scheme of second trip contamination for pulsed Doppler polarimetric weather radars with the ability of random phase coding. This scheme can be easily implemented in a magnetron radar without any hardware changes. For relatively weak contamination, identification and mitigation are based on a multilag processing method, which uses multiple lags of both the auto- and cross-correlation functions to estimate radar moments. For relatively strong contamination, instantaneous phase variations of horizontal and vertical polarization channels are combined into a simple fuzzy-logic scheme to complete the identification. Data from the C-band OU-PRIME radar are used to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme for identification and mitigation of second-trip echoes.