Decoupling of sea surface and rain backscatter for spaceborne scatterometers

For the operational spaceborne scatterometers, there is no effective way to eliminate the influence of the rain. Echoes contaminated by the rain are discarded directly. In this paper, a special designed spaceborne scatterometer and its decoupling methods of echoes from sea surface and rain are introduced. The main steps of decoupling methods are as follows. First, the scatterometer system parameters are slightly adjusted to acquire both the rain and sea surface echoes simultaneously. Next, the data of the scatterometer are copied and processed separately, one copy for rain retrieving and the other copy for sea surface backscatter retrieving. Finally, the rain attenuations are compensate to modify the bottom rain rate and the sea surface backscatter energy.