The authors developed a calibration procedure for imaging radar polarimeters and applied it to a set of images acquired by the NASA DC-8 multifrequency radar system. The technique requires the use of ground reflectors of known cross-section for absolute calibration, that is, solution for sigma /sup 0/; however, the image data themselves can usually provide all information necessary for phase calibration and for antenna crosstalk correction. The accuracy of the approach, as measured by calculating the cross-section residuals of known targets in each calibrated scene, is on the order of +or-1-2 dB at the P- and C-band, but improves to +or-0.5 dB at the L-band. The authors present the results of applying this technique to radar scenes of lava flows of varying roughness, temperate and tropical rain forests, and ocean water surfaces. They also present several example applications which are feasible with calibrated data but which would be difficult to implement with uncalibrated data.>

We have analyzed radar polarimeter signals from a set of trihedral corner reflectors located in the Goldstone Dry Lake in Cafifornia, and observed three types of scattering behavior: i) Bragg-like slightly rough surface scattering that represents the background signal from the dry lake, ii) trihedral corner reflector scattering that returns the incident polarization, and iii) two-bounce corner reflector scattering resulting from a particular alignment of a trihedral reflector. In the latter case, we can measure within about 3° the orientation angle of the apparent dihedral trough, even though the 2-m reflector is much smaller than the 10-m resolution element of our radar. Thus a radar calibration approach using trihedral corner reflectors should be designed such that precise alignment of the reflectors is ensured, as three-bounce and two-bounce geometries lead to very different cross sections and hence very different inferred calibration factors.