Statistical characterization of the ground clutter variability from Dual-Polarization Radar measurements

In this paper, the potential of dual polarization measurements to assess the temporal variability of the backscattered signals from ground clutter is presented. The stationarity of ground clutter is a fundamental requirement to estimate the atmospheric refractivity from measurements of phase variation between responses from different targets at different time instants. It is investigated if the phase difference between the two co-polarized components of the polarimetric radar returns helps to remove the contributions that are not due specifically to the signal variability, such as the variation of the atmospheric refractivity. Polarimetric data are obtained using a C-Band Dual Polarization Weather Radar. The proposed method is compared with three different single polarization methods.