Correction of propagation effects in s-band circular polarisation-diversity radars

A new method for correcting propagation effects in circular polarisation diversity radars at S-band is described. By considering the transformation of the coherency matrix under the influence of propagation it is shown that corrections can be derived from the correlation data of individual range gates. This avoids the use of any iterative gate-by-gate procedure previously shown to be unstable. Assuming the mean orientation of the precipitation particles is known to within 1¿¿2¿¿ it is found that essentially all the polarisation information can be recovered with an acceptably small error. Application of the correction procedure to storm data verifies that use of the circular polarisation technique at S-band can now be extended to heavy precipitation regions.