As someone in the field, the only thing that really stood out about this radar was it's incredibly small beamwidth(.22 degrees compared to a normal .8-1 for mos

As someone in the field, the only thing that really stood out about this radar was it's incredibly small beamwidth(.22 degrees compared to a normal .8-1 for most weather radars), and it's incredibly small range gates(.5 meters compared to the 20 meters my radar operates at). That having been said, if this isn't a dual polarization radar, which it sounds like it isn't, then this is still significantly behind the state of the art. The trend has been to move to higher frequency, lower power radars at X, Ku, and Ka band. Also modern weather radars transmit both H and V polarizations allowing us to measure the shape of the raindrops as well as retrieve full drop size distributions. See http://www.casa.umass.edu/main/research/ http://www.casa.umass.edu/main/research/ and http://pmm.nasa.gov/science/ground-validation/D3R http://pmm.nasa.gov/science/ground-validation/D3R as examples of newer systems.