Evaluation of Surface Clutter for Future Geostationary Spaceborne Weather Radar

Surface clutter interference will be one of the important problems for the future of geostationary spaceborne weather radar (GSWR). The aim of this work is to provide some numerical analyses on surface clutter interference and part of the performance evaluation for the future implementation of GSWR. The received powers of rain echoes, land and sea surfaces from a radar scattering volume are calculated numerically based on the derived radar equations, assuming a uniform rain layer and appropriate land and sea surface scattering models. An antenna pattern function based on a Bessel curve and Taylor weighting is considered to approximate the realistic spherical antenna of a GSWR. The power ratio of the rain echo signal to clutter (SCR) is then used to evaluate the extension of surface clutter interference. The study demonstrates that the entire region of surface clutter interference in GSWR will be wider than those in tropical rainfall measuring mission precipitation radar (TRMM PR). Most strong surface clutter comes from the antenna mainlobe, and the decrease of clutter contamination through reducing the level of the antenna sidelobe and range sidelobe are not obvious. In addition, the clutter interference is easily affected by rain attenuation in the Ka-band. When rain intensity is greater than 10 mm/h, most of rain echoes at off-nadir scanning angles will not be interfered by surface clutter