Abstract
The Advanced Microwave Sounding Unit, AMSU-B, is a five channel microwave radiometer to be flown later this decade on the series of polar orbiting spacecraft NOAA-K, L and M. It will provide global data in support of synoptic weather forecasting by sounding the water vapour content of the atmosphere from the ‘window’ channels at 89 and 150 GHz to the strong resonance line at 183.3 GHz. It has a scan period of 2 2 3 seconds and provides 90 earth view pixels each of nominal beam width 1.1 degrees during earth scan. The key radiometric requirements of the instrument are to provide a temperature sensitivity of 1 to 1.2K depending on channel, a linearity within 0.3 of the temperature sensitivity and a beam efficiency of 95%. This paper describes the design of the AMSU-B, the ground based buy-off tests and results obtained for the Proto-Flight Model (PFM), Flight 2 (FM2) and Flight 3 (FM3) Models in the context of these requirements. The Engineering Model testing is described in reference /1/.
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