The primary mission of the SeaWinds scatterometer on the QuikSCAT satellite is to infer surface wind vector from ocean backscatter measurements. Occasionally the backscatter measurements are contaminated by the presence of rain; therefore a reliable method of identifying rain is needed. Fortunately, the SeaWinds scatterometer simultaneously obtains active (scattering) and passive (emission) mea...

A scheme to obtain relatively scaled profiles of electron cyclotron emission (ECE) temperature directly from uncalibrated raw radiometer data is proposed and has been tested for the 2009 campaign KSTAR plasmas. The proposed method utilizes a position controlled system to move the plasma adiabatically and compares ECE radiometer channels at the same relative radial positions assuming the profile...

Specific utilization of a microwave radiometer for online monitoring, detection and, especially, prediction of particular dynamic atmospheric phenomena such as precipitation and cloudiness is proposed in the paper. The ground-based microwave radiometer and meteorological stations were incorporated into the measurement campaign in order to observe and analyze actual brightness temperature change...

The WMAP satellite has completed one year of measurements of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) radiation using 20 differential high-electron-mobility-transistor (HEMT) based radiometers. All the radiometers are functioning nominally, and characterizations of the on-orbit radiometer performance are presented, with an emphasis on properties that are required for the production of sky maps fro...

The Microwave Limb Sounder on the Aura satellite has a radiometer at 2.5 THz to perform global mapping of OH in the atmosphere. The OH radiometer utilizes two Schottky-diode mixers pumped by an optically pumped THz gas laser local oscillator. The laser was first turned on in space on July 22, 2004, and has performed without issue for more than 30 months. The specifications, design, and modeling...

This paper presents the description and performance tests of an L-band microwave radiometer with Digital Beamforming (DBF), developed for the Passive Advanced Unit (PAU) for ocean monitoring project. PAU is an instrument that combines, in a single receiver and without time multiplexing, a microwave radiometer at L-band (PAU-RAD) and a GPS-reflectometer (PAU-GNSS-R). This paper focuses on the PA...

[1] This study quantifies the effects of Sun reflection over land surfaces on radiometric measurements at L-band. The impact of the reflected Sun on radiometric measurements over a grass field and over an agricultural area reached 25 K and 17 K respectively. A model that predicts the impact of Sun reflection over land is developed and tested for two different radiometer configurations and spati...

A radiometer amplifier capable of wide-range optical measurement is described. Based on a novel automatically ranged electrometer and amplifier circuit, the radiometer provides a quasilinear analog output for the measurement of input radiation over ten orders of magnitude. Together with the scheme of phase-sensitive detection of modulated optical signals, the circuit resulted in an output volta...

Future sea surface salinity missions will require Lband radiometers to have calibration stabilities of ≤ 0.05 K over 2 days. This research program has focused on determining the optimum radiometer requirements and configuration to achieve this objective. System configuration and component performance have been evaluated with radiometer test beds at both JPL and GSFC. The GSFC testbed uses a cry...

LYRA, the Lyman-α radiometer, is a high–cadence (100 Hz) solar VUV radiometer which will measure disk–integrated irradiances in 4 wavelength channels. Special emphasis is given on novel detectors based on diamond which will be tested for the first time in space. Two kinds of detectors are employed: MSM– and PiN–type detectors. Their particular advantage compared to silicon detectors lies in the...