Radar Backscatter Measurement Accuracy for a Spaceborne Pencil-Beam Wind Scatterometer with Transmit - Geoscience and Remote Sensing, IEEE Transactions on

Scatterometers are remote sensing radars designed to measure near-surface winds over the ocean. The difficulties of accommodating traditional fan-beam scatterometers on spacecraft has lead to the development of a scanning pencilbeam instrument known as SeaWinds. SeaWinds will be part of the Japanese Advanced Earth Observing Satellite II (ADEOSII) to be launched in 1999. To analyze the performance of the SeaWinds design, a new expression for the measurement accuracy of a pencil-beam system is required. In this paper we derive a general expression for the backscatter measurement accuracy for a pencil-beam scatterometer which includes the effects of transmit signal modulation with simple power detection. Both separate and simultaneous signal+noise and noise-only measurements are considered. The utility of the new expression for scatterometer design tradeoffs is demonstrated using a simplified geometry. A separate paper [8] describes detailed tradeoffs made to develop the SeaWinds design.