Synthetic Aperture Microwave Radiometer and Image Retrieval

Abstract

In this paper, the principle of synthetic aperture microwave radiometer (SARad) is introduced. The differences between SARad for earth observation and its parentage in radio astronomy, the synthetic aperture radio telescope, are analyzed, which results in two key technologies of SARad: the design of baseline combination and the image retrieval algorithm. In this paper, the general relationship between the output of an interfe rometer , which is called the visibility function or the spatial frequency sampling, and the baseline parameters is presented. The general formulation of visibility function and functional expression of the brightness temperature distribution from retrieved from visibility function are derived. Some discussions on the image retrieval and numerical simulations are given.