Preliminary Studies on CIMR Antenna Pattern Brightness Temperature Compensation

Spaceborne microwave radiometry provides an essential contribution to monitoring the Earth with varying spatial resolution both related to the reflector dimension and the frequency of operation. The ESA's Copernicus imaging microwave radiometer (CIMR) mission aims at collecting the geophy...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Applied Earth Observations and Remote Sensing
Main Authors: Marco Brogioni, Ada Vittoria Bosisio, Alessandro Lapini, Giovanni Macelloni, Giuseppe Addamo, Giuseppe Virone, Walter Di Nicolantonio, Marco Grilli, Oscar A. Peverini
Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
Language:English
Published: IEEE 2022
Subjects:
Antenna pattern correction (APC)
Copernicus imaging microwave radiometer (CIMR)
microwave radiometry
radiometric resolution
Ocean engineering
TC1501-1800
Geophysics. Cosmic physics
QC801-809
Sea ice
Online Access:https://doi.org/10.1109/JSTARS.2021.3124829
https://doaj.org/article/64ce6627aa054e8d92a49dadfae121b8
Description
Summary:Spaceborne microwave radiometry provides an essential contribution to monitoring the Earth with varying spatial resolution both related to the reflector dimension and the frequency of operation. The ESA's Copernicus imaging microwave radiometer (CIMR) mission aims at collecting the geophysical observables at a spatial resolution ranging from 60 km in L band to 4 km in Ka band. This goal can be achieved by equipping CIMR with a large unfurlable mesh reflector antenna. A limitation of the antenna design is that the antenna pattern includes grating lobes that contaminate the scene measurement with contributions originated far from the nominal footprint. This effect introduces inaccuracies in brightness temperature measurements, particularly when facing radiometric discontinuities, e.g., near the coastlines and sea ice edges, which can be greater than the mission required maximum of 0.5 K. The aim of this article is to assess a technique which will be able to correct the effects of antenna pattern and obtain reliable T B measurements. The analyzed simple technique is based on a regularized deconvolution of the antenna pattern to reconstruct the actual brightness temperatures. The technique was tested over a synthetic scenario that mimics both steep and smooth variations in spatial and thermal domains.

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