A model-based technique for estimating impairment covariance associated with a MIMO signal is disclosed. In an exemplary method, an impairment model is constructed for a received composite information signal comprising at least a first data stream transmitted from first and second antennas according to a first antenna weighting vector. The impairment model includes first and second model terms corresponding to the first and second antennas, respectively, but in several embodiments does not include a cross-antenna interference term. In another embodiment, an impairment model for a received MIMO signal is constructed by computing an impairment model term for each antenna and an additional term to account for preceding interference in a single-stream MIMO transmission scenario. The impairment terms are grouped so that only two associated scaling terms are unknown; values for the scaling terms are estimated by fitting the model to measured impairment covariance values.