Improvement of the Clutter Removal Method for the Spaceborne Precipitation Radars

For the spaceborne precipitation radars, since the surface echoes are very strong, the clutter echoes caused by the antenna sidelobe mask the echoes of light precipitation even if the low sidelobe antenna is designed. This study develops a method of the clutter removal for the spaceborne precipitation radars to mitigate the misjudgment of the light precipitation detection. The radar data of the Dual-frequency precipitation radar (DPR) onboard the Global Precipitation Measurement mission's (GPM 's) core satellite and the Precipitation Radar (PR) onboard the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) satellite are analyzed to construct those clutter databases. Once the databases are created, the magnitude of the clutter echoes is estimated and its contribution is subtracted from the observed echo power. When the clutter removal developed in this study are applied, the residual clutter signals are mitigated compared with the clutter removal adopted in version 06 processing.