An Improved Blackbody Calibration Cadence for CYGNSS

Abstract

An improved blackbody calibration procedure is developed, implemented, and tested for the cyclone global navigation satellite system (CYGNSS). Previously, CYGNSS calibrated its receivers once every minute to account for temperature-induced gain fluctuations. The time spent making calibration measurements limited the duty cycle of wind-speed measurements to approximately 90%. The analysis presented here shows that the 1-min cadence was overly conservative and can be increased to once every 10 min with minimal impact to data quality, thereby improving the wind-speed duty cycle to 98%. A permanent change to the blackbody cadence was made for the complete eight-satellite constellation during July 27, 2021–August 3, 2021, and subsequent analysis verifies that the new cadence improves duty cycle without impacting science data quality, as expected.