Investigation of Rain Induced Depolarization by Means of a Physically Based Simulator

A physically based simulator is applied in this work to investigate the depolarization induced by rain along Earth-space links, and specifically to shed light on the impact of different precipitation types (stratiform/convective) and of the axial ratio selected to model the drop oblateness. To this aim, we employ rain maps derived from an S-band weather radar as input to the simulator. Results indicate that the Cross Polar Discrimination (XPD) depends more on the drop axial ratio than on the type of precipitation event, and, more in general, they give a hint of the usefulness of the proposed simulator to isolate and investigate the contribution of the different atmospheric constituents to the overall XPD.