The European Space Agency will launch the first salinity satellite for remotely sensing the global soil moisture and ocean salinity (SMOS) at a sun-synchronous orbit in 2009. One of the payloads on the satellite is a ...The European Space Agency will launch the first salinity satellite for remotely sensing the global soil moisture and ocean salinity (SMOS) at a sun-synchronous orbit in 2009. One of the payloads on the satellite is a synthetic aperture microwave radiometer (MIRAS), which is an innovative instrument designed as a two-dimensional (2D) interferometer for acquiring brightness temperature (TB) at L-band (1.4 GHz). MIRAS allows measuring TB at a series of incidences for full polarizations. As the satellite travels, a given location within the 2D field of view is observed from different incidence angles. The authors develop a new scheme to retrieve the sea-surface salinity (SSS) from SMOS's TB at multi-incidence angles in a pixel, utilizing the properties of emissivity changing with incidence angles. All measurements of a given Stokes parameter in a pixel are first fitted to incidence angles in three order polynomial, and then the smoothed data are used for retrieving the SSS. The procedure will remove the random noise in TB greatly. Furthermore, the new method shows that the error in retrieved SSS is very sensitive to the system biases in the calibrated TB of the sensor, but the error in the retrieval is also a system bias, which can be corrected by post-launch validation. Therefore, this method may also serve as a means to evaluate the calibration precision in TB.展开更多
文摘The European Space Agency will launch the first salinity satellite for remotely sensing the global soil moisture and ocean salinity (SMOS) at a sun-synchronous orbit in 2009. One of the payloads on the satellite is a synthetic aperture microwave radiometer (MIRAS), which is an innovative instrument designed as a two-dimensional (2D) interferometer for acquiring brightness temperature (TB) at L-band (1.4 GHz). MIRAS allows measuring TB at a series of incidences for full polarizations. As the satellite travels, a given location within the 2D field of view is observed from different incidence angles. The authors develop a new scheme to retrieve the sea-surface salinity (SSS) from SMOS's TB at multi-incidence angles in a pixel, utilizing the properties of emissivity changing with incidence angles. All measurements of a given Stokes parameter in a pixel are first fitted to incidence angles in three order polynomial, and then the smoothed data are used for retrieving the SSS. The procedure will remove the random noise in TB greatly. Furthermore, the new method shows that the error in retrieved SSS is very sensitive to the system biases in the calibrated TB of the sensor, but the error in the retrieval is also a system bias, which can be corrected by post-launch validation. Therefore, this method may also serve as a means to evaluate the calibration precision in TB.
