Simulations of radar signals are important in understanding the performance of a radar system and its signal processing. Recently, a weather radar simulator has been developed to generate time series radar signals from numerical weather prediction (NWP) model output. The radar signal is a coherent sum of the echoes from all the individual scatterers while their size and motion are determined by the Advanced Region Prediction System (ARPS). Currently, the simulator generates single polarization radar signals.

The operational WSR-88D (Weather Surveillance Radar 88-Doppler) radar network is being upgraded to dual polarization and will be completed within the next few years. Therefore, it is worthwhile to extend the radar simulator with polarimetric capability. In this paper, we present the added feature of generating radar signals for dual-polarization and with the propagation effect included. Further, polarimetric radar parameters such as differential reflectivity, differential phase and copolar cross correlation coefficient are estimated and are shown to be consistent with polarimetric radar measurements.