High cross-polarization isolation (CPI) is crucial to the accurate polarization measurement using polarimetric phased array radar (PPAR). In this paper, we propose an adaptive direction-dependent polarization state configuration (AD2PSC) method to improve the polarization isolation. Compared with conventional fixed polarization state of radiated wave whether it is linear, circular or elliptical polarization state, our AD2PSC approach configures the polarization state on basis of beam steering. To achieve the adaptive configuration of magnitude and phase of the dual-polarization antenna, an improved steepest descent algorithm is put forward. To facilitate the uniform representation for the polarization measurement application of PPAR, the universal expressions of intrinsic and measured backscatter matrices are derived for arbitrary polarization state. The dualpolarization dipole array is used to assess the priority of our proposed method. Compared with the conventional approaches,

our approach could obtain higher CPI while being available for a larger scanning range. The configured CPI meets the specific polarization requirement for PPAR.