The Cloud Profiling Radar (CPR) is affected by surface clutter like all downward looking atmospheric radars and represents a performance limiting factor in the detection of rain close to the surface and of low clouds. In the case of CPR the effect of surface clutter extends almost 1 kilometer in the atmosphere. In order to reduce the impact of surface clutter to the lowest 500 m a technique to estimate the contribution from ocean surface backscatter to the total observed power has been developed and integrated in the L1B processing. The technique and the achieved results are described in this paper.

On the other hand, the surface backscatter carries useful information which has been used to validate the radar pointing, estimate the total Path Integrated Attenuation, and study the properties of land cover. Although all of the above applications are common to all downward looking atmospheric radars, we will describe some of the unique features in their application to CloudSat (and any other W-band spaceborne cloud radar).

The research described in this paper was carried out by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.