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Polarization properties of radar waves that are scattered from atmospheric objects are of great interest in meteorological studies. However, polarimetric radar measurements are often not sufficiently accurate for retrieving physical properties of targets. To compensate for errors, radar polarimetric calibration is applied. Typical calibrations are performed based on measurements of point targets with known scattering matrices located in the boresight of the antenna. Such calibration takes into account the polarization state of the antenna pattern only at one point. Since radar measurements of atmospheric phenomena involve distributed targets that fill the full antenna beam, point target radar calibrations are inadequate for meteorological studies. This paper explains in detail the effects of the complete antenna patterns on weather echoes. It is shown that the conventional polarimetric calibration can be significantly improved by incorporating light-rain (Ͻ20 dBZ) zenith-pointing measurements into the calibration procedure. As a result, the sensitivity of cross-polar measurements can be improved by 7 dB on average. Also it is shown that the bias in co-cross-polar correlation coefficient can be reduced.

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This study presents an analysis of 195 rainfall events gathered with the X-band weather radar SOLIDAR and a tipping bucket rain gauge network near Delft, The Netherlands, between May 1993 and April 1994. The aim of this paper is to present a thorough analysis of a clima-tological dataset using a high spatial (120 m) and temporal (16 s) resolution X-band radar. This makes it a study of the potential for high-resolution rainfall measurements with non-polarimetric X-band radar over flat terrain. An appropriate radar reflectivity-rain rate relation is derived from measurements of raindrop size distributions and compared with radar-rain gauge data. The radar calibration is assessed using a long-term comparison of rain gauge measurements with corresponding radar reflectivities as well as by analyzing the evolution of the stability of ground clutter areas over time. Three different methods for ground clutter correction as well as the effectiveness of forward and backward atten-uation correction algorithms have been studied. Five individual rainfall events are discussed in detail to illustrate the strengths and weaknesses of high-resolution X-band radar and the effectiveness of the presented correction methods. X-band radar is found to be able to measure the space-time variation of rainfall at high resolution, far greater than what can be achieved by rain gauge networks or a typical operational C-band weather radar. On the other hand, SOLIDAR can suffer from receiver saturation, wet radome attenuation as well as signal loss along the path. During very strong convective situations the signal can even be lost completely. In combination with several rain gauges for quality control, high resolution X-band radar is considered to be suitable for rainfall monitoring over relatively small (urban) catchments. These results offer great prospects for the new high resolution polarimetric doppler X-band radar IDRA.