On the Spectral and Polarimetric Signatures of a Bright Scatterer before and after Hardware Replacement

Abstract

A previous study has used the stable and peculiar echoes backscattered by a single “bright scatterer” (BS) during five winter days to characterize the hardware of C-band, the dual-polarization radar located at Monte Lema (1625 m altitude) in Southern Switzerland. The BS is the 90 m tall metallic tower on Cimetta (1633 m altitude, 18 km range). In this note, the statistics of the echoes from the BS were derived from other ten dry days with normal propagation conditions in winter 2015 and January 2019. The study confirms that spectral signatures, such as spectrum width, wideband noise and Doppler velocity, were persistently stable. Regarding the polarimetric signatures, the large values (with small dispersion) of the copolar correlation coefficient between horizontal and vertical polarization were also confirmed: the average value was 0.9961 (0.9982) in winter 2015 (January 2019); the daily standard deviations were very small, ranging from 0.0007 to 0.0030. The dispersion of the differential phase shift was also confirmed to be quite small: the daily standard deviation ranged from a minimum of 2.5° to a maximum of 5.3°. Radar reflectivities in both polarizations were typically around 80 dBz and were confirmed to be among the largest values observed in the surveillance volume of the Monte Lema radar. Finally, another recent 5-day data set from January 2020 was analyzed after the replacement of the radar calibration unit that includes low noise amplifiers: these five days show poorer characteristics of the polarimetric signatures and a few outliers affecting the spectral signatures. It was shown that the “historical” polarimetric and spectral signatures of a bright scatterer could represent a benchmark for an in-depth comparison after hardware replacements.