Congratulations Dr. Stefko!
On March 29, 2023, Marcel Stefko has successfully presented and defended his PhD thesis with the title: “Applications of bistatic Ku-band radar in snow-covered environments".
In his thesis he investigated new pathways towards applications of bistatic radar systems in snow-covered environments. To achieve this, in the first part of his thesis Marcel developed new operation and calibration procedures for the bistatic operation mode of our radar system KAPRI, and subsequently applied it to acquire data in snow-covered areas around Switzerland, including the Davos area as well as the Great Aletsch Glacier.
His work expands our understanding of polarimetric scattering properties of snow cover in both monostatic and bistatic modes, as well as provides new insights into the properties of the coherent backscatter opposition effect (CBOE) in terrestrial snow. The calibration requirements of bistatic KAPRI also led to development of a novel radar calibration concept VSPARC, which allows full-polarimetric calibration under arbitrary bistatic angles.