Calibration Of Microwave Radiometers Research Articles

Microwave Radiometer Calibration Using Low-Noise Amplifier as Calibration Source

Microwave Radiometer Calibration Using Low-Noise Amplifier as Calibration Source

Microwave Radiometer Calibration Using Deep Learning With Reduced Reference Information and 2-D Spectral Features

Microwave Radiometer Calibration Using Deep Learning With Reduced Reference Information and 2-D Spectral Features

On-Orbit Calibration and Wet Tropospheric Correction of HY-2C Correction Microwave Radiometer

HY-2C is the third satellite in China’s ocean dynamic environment satellite series, and carries a correction microwave radiometer (CMR) to correct the wet tropospheric path delay for the aligned radar altimeter. To effectively use the brightness temperatures (TB) of CMR to retrieve path delay, an on-orbit calibration effort is required. In this study, an antenna pattern correction (APC) method and a neural network method are used to perform an on-orbit calibration for CMR’s antenna temperatures and a model based on the Whale Optimization Algorithm (WOA), Levenberg–Marquardt (LM) algorithm, and Back-Propagation neural network (WOA–LM–BP) has been proposed to retrieve the wet tropospheric correction (WTC) of CMR. The on-orbit calibration results, compared with the simulated brightness temperatures calculated by the radiative transfer model (RTM), have shown that compared with the APC method, the neural network method can almost eliminate the latitude variation, and the total bias and standard deviation of the on-orbit calibrated TB at all channels have obviously decreased. The retrieved WTC results also have shown that the retrieved WTC of CMR has a good agreement with the corresponding ones from the model-derived WTC and Jason-3.

Direct Modeling of Thermal-Radiation Reception by Antenna in Close Range

In this work, an interesting near-field propagation problem in the microwave radiometer calibration is addressed, which is the antenna reception of thermal radiation from calibration target. Efforts in simultaneously modeling the target and antenna within the same 2-D full-wave scenario are reported. Specifically, the coated pyramids and horn antennas are considered. Based on the incoherent nature of local thermal sources in the coating layer and the fluctuation-dissipation theorem (FDT), the direct modeling of receiving power and further brightness temperature ( <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$BT$ </tex-math></inline-formula> ) at the antenna waveguide port can be achieved. The direct modeling is then quantified based on the classic concept of antenna reception in an ideal blackbody chamber. Further, it is shown in the results that mutual coupling affects the antenna reception in a fluctuating manner, and the target structural radiation raises the antenna reception in a very close distance. That means, the thermal reception can be affected by both the antenna and target structures in the near field. Also, the Lambertian radiation properties of the coated pyramidal blackbody are clarified in the direct calculated results. This work reveals the complex scenario of close range <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$BT$ </tex-math></inline-formula> transfer, and opens the possibility of quantitatively modeling it for practical applications with further investigations.

On the Total Reflectivity Estimation of Microwave Calibration Targets by Backscattering Measurements

Before practical usage in microwave radiometers, the calibration targets must be tested for its emissivity/total reflectivity. In this work, we address the issue that remains in the total reflectivity determination, which is estimating the total reflectivity based on measured backscattering in the monostatic configuration, specifically at high frequencies. Based on the efficient modeling on periodic unit of the array-shaped calibration target, we quantitatively evaluate the relationship between backscattering and the total reflectivity, on the common structure of coated cones and coated pyramids. It is found that the total reflectivity estimation becomes target-specific for the coated cones; meanwhile, stable compensation can be concluded for the pyramidal units, which is important for practical testing in submillimeter applications. Then, the disturbing effects of the geometric defects on the total reflectivity estimation are discussed, and it is inferred that wideband measurement is vital for diagnosing those defects. Furthermore, actual test results are analyzed, showing the complex scenario in estimating the total reflectivity of a prototype with shape defects. Also, the numerical concluded <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$C_{g}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> compensation is verified in the clear case of a fine prototype. The findings in this work offer a direct reference for the application of microwave radiometer calibration, especially in the region of submillimeter waves.

On the Reflectivity Measurements of Microwave Blackbody in Bistatic Near-Field Configuration

Determining the total reflectivity of a manufactured microwave blackbody is a significant problem for the microwave radiometer calibration. In this work, the authors report the progress in testing the standard facility for microwave blackbody reflectivity determination in China. Following a bistatic configuration, the facility is designed to measure the Floquet scattering properties of the array-shaped microwave blackbody, and then based on that, the total reflectivity is extracted, covering a vast frequency range from 6 to 500 GHz. In this work, the key configurations of the facility design, the testing procedures, and the data processes are demonstrated. And the measured results validate the ability of the standard facility in capturing weak Floquet scattering from blackbody targets. Two typical types of array-shaped blackbodies, coated cones, and coated pyramids are included in this study. In the results, the effects of manufacturing imperfections on the measured scattering as well as the total reflectivity are investigated. Furthermore, it is shown in the results of 364, 380, and 452 GHz that the issue of referencing target is worthy of further investigation at very high frequencies. The presented design, testing procedure, and measured scattering properties provide direct reference for the blackbody reflectivity determination in the microwave radiometer calibration applications.

Calibration of the space-borne microwave humidity sounder based on real-time thermal emission from lunar surface

Calibration is a key issue for quantitative application of meteorological satellite data. The complex space environment may cause many uncertainties in data calibration. A highly stable and reliable calibrator in flight is needed. Because the Moon has no atmosphere and no environmental variation, the physical and chemical properties of its surface are stable in the long term. The Moon might be an ideal candidate for in-flight thermal calibration. In advanced satellite-borne microwave remote sensing such as NOAA-18, the deep space view (DSV) of the microwave humidity sounder (MHS) has viewed the Moon many times every year. Using the thermal-physical properties of the lunar regolith derived from the Diviner infrared (IR) brightness temperature (TB) data, we solve the one-dimensional heat conduction equation to obtain the temperature profile of the near side of the lunar regolith medium. The loss tangents of the regolith medium are retrieved from microwave TB data of the Chinese satellite Chang’e-2. The integrated radiative transfer equation is used to simulate the weighted disk-average TB of the lunar surface for the MHS channels at 89, 157, and 183 GHz for the year 2011. The Moon is taken as an extended circular target. The simulated TBs are used to correct the full width at half maximum (FWHM) fitted with the MHS counts. We analyze the influences of the distance between the satellite and the Moon, the lunar phase angle, and the FWHM of the radiometer on the inverted FWHM. The corrected TB data are compared with the simulation. This paper presents a new method for thermal calibration of spaceborne in-flight microwave and millimeter-wave radiometers with the weighted disk-average TB of the lunar surface.

Bayesian modeling of microwave radiometer calibration on the example of the Wendelstein 7-X electron cyclotron emission diagnostic.

This paper reports about a novel approach to the absolute intensity calibration of an electron cyclotron emission (ECE) spectroscopy system. Typically, an ECE radiometer consists of tens of separated frequency channels corresponding to different plasma locations. An absolute calibration of the overall diagnostic including near plasma optics and transmission line is achieved with blackbody sources at LN2 temperature and room temperature via a hot/cold calibration mirror unit. As the thermal emission of the calibration source is typically a few thousand times lower than the receiver noise temperature, coherent averaging over several hours is required to get a sufficient signal to noise ratio. A forward model suitable for any radiometer calibration using the hot/cold method and a periodic switch between them has been developed and used to extract the voltage difference between the hot and cold temperature source via Bayesian analysis. In contrast to the classical analysis which evaluates only the reference temperatures, the forward model takes into account intermediate effective temperatures caused by the finite beam width and thus uses all available data optimally. This allows the evaluation of weak channels where a classical analysis would not be feasible, is statistically rigorous, and provides a measurement of the beam width. By using a variance scaling factor, a model sensitive adaptation of the absolute uncertainties can be implemented, which will be used for the combined diagnostic Bayesian modeling analysis.

An Efficient Gain Estimation in the Calibration of Noise-Adding Total Power Radiometers for Radiometric Resolution Improvement

Calibration of microwave radiometers is a crucial task for reliable and accurate antenna temperature measurements in remote sensing applications. This paper describes a processing procedure for data calibration of noise-adding (NA) total power (TP) radiometers, without thermal stabilization, able to improve the radiometric resolution performance and keep good accuracy. This method, easily implementable, is based on the strong dependence of the radiometric gain on the internal physical temperature of the system. It provides a calibration of the output voltage measured in the TP mode exploiting the noise source power injection only every 30 min. The quality of the proposed procedure was assessed by means of three experiments carried out in different years and environmental conditions, using a low-cost NA TP radiometer operating at 12.65 GHz. The measurements show an uncertainty better than 0.7 K and, above all, a clear improvement in radiometric resolution (below 0.1 K). The radiometric resolution benefit is particularly appreciable in applications where the aim is the detection of small radiation power increments. Two experimental tests show how this method for data calibration effectively resolves the warm target counting inside the antenna footprint, while the same data measured with the standard NA procedure do not allow the same detection capability.

A winding machine for polarized wire grid of microwave radiometer calibration

Polarized wire grid has been used as a low-energy polarization separator in many calibration systems. A novel machine was developed for winding the polarized wire grids with different sizes and shapes. In this paper, the process of design including parameters calculation, structural analysis, and the calibration for the winding device is presented. Finally, taking an oval grid as an example, the fabrication and the testing results is shown. A 250 mm×350 mm oval polarized wire grid is fabricated by using this machine, with 0.1 mm diameter molybdenum wires at the distance of 0.3 ± 0.02 mm. And it achieved the 01. mm flatness requirement. The machine used is robust and can be easily extended to even 200 × 200 mm2 – 500 mm × 500 mm grids with 0.08–0.2 mm diameter wires at the distance of 0.1–0.5 mm.

Ground-Based Microwave Radiometer Calibration: an Overview

This paper intends to briefly present some basic concepts on the microwave radiometry and radiometer calibration research in remote sensing applications and demonstrate results and analysis of the cryogenic calibration of a microwave ground-based radiometer currently deployed in scientific campaigns in Brazil. The equipment described in this text operates at 22 – 30 GHz and at 51 – 59 GHz frequency ranges and uses as the calibration standard a target cooled by liquid nitrogen. Since an accurate calibration (with observation errors below 0.5 K) is important to provide confidence in the retrieval of vertical temperature and humidity profiles, this work aims also to comment on some effects of the errors in calibration procedure on the atmospheric parameters of interest.

RapidScat Cross-Calibration Using the Double Difference Technique

RapidScat is a National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Ku-Band scatterometer that was operated onboard the International Space Station between September 2014 and August 2016 when the mission effectively ended after an irrecoverable instrument failure. A unique non-Sun-synchronous orbit facilitated global contiguous geographical sampling between the ±56° latitude. For the first time, such an orbit enabled an overlap with other scatterometers flying in Sun-synchronous orbits. The double-difference technique was developed and successfully used for microwave radiometer calibration at the Remote Sensing Laboratory at the University of Central Florida, USA. This paper presents the extension of the double difference methodology to scatterometry. The methodology has been adopted for the cross-instrument calibration between RapidScat and QuikScat scatterometers simultaneously orbiting the Earth on-board two independent satellite platforms. The double-difference technique was deployed to compare measurements from these two scatterometers, as a more accurate alternative to the classic single difference approach. The work summarized in this paper addressed a cross-calibration algorithm developed and applied to RapidScat and QuikScat data in the period from January 2015 to March 2016. The initial results of the statistical analysis and biases between the two scatterometers are presented. Calculated biases may be used for measurement correction and reprocessing.

Assessment of Radiometer Calibration with GPS Radio Occultation for the MiRaTA CubeSat Mission.

The Microwave Radiometer Technology Acceleration (MiRaTA) is a 3U CubeSat mission sponsored by the NASA Earth Science Technology Office (ESTO). The science payload on MiRaTA consists of a tri-band microwave radiometer and Global Positioning System (GPS) radio occultation (GPSRO) sensor. The microwave radiometer takes measurements of all-weather temperature (V-band, 50-57 GHz), water vapor (G-band, 175-191 GHz), and cloud ice (G-band, 205 GHz) to provide observations used to improve weather forecasting. The Aerospace Corporation's GPSRO experiment, called the Compact TEC (Total Electron Content) and Atmospheric GPS Sensor (CTAGS), measures profiles of temperature and pressure in the upper troposphere/lower stratosphere (∼20 km) and electron density in the ionosphere (over 100 km). The MiRaTA mission will validate new technologies in both passive microwave radiometry and GPS radio occultation: (1) new ultra-compact and low-power technology for multi-channel and multi-band passive microwave radiometers, (2) the application of a commercial off the shelf (COTS) GPS receiver and custom patch antenna array technology to obtain neutral atmospheric GPSRO retrieval from a nanosatellite, and (3) a new approach to spaceborne microwave radiometer calibration using adjacent GPSRO measurements. In this paper, we focus on objective (3), developing operational models to meet a mission goal of 100 concurrent radiometer and GPSRO measurements, and estimating the temperature measurement precision for the CTAGS instrument based on thermal noise. Based on an analysis of thermal noise of the CTAGS instrument, the expected temperature retrieval precision is between 0.17 K and 1.4 K, which supports the improvement of radiometric calibration to 0.25 K.

Calibrating ground‐based microwave radiometers: Uncertainty and drifts

AbstractThe quality of microwave radiometer (MWR) calibrations, including both the absolute radiometric accuracy and the spectral consistency, determines the accuracy of geophysical retrievals. The Microwave Radiometer Calibration Experiment (MiRaCalE) was conducted to evaluate the performance of MWR calibration techniques, especially of the so‐called Tipping Curve Calibrations (TCC) and Liquid Nitrogen Calibrations (LN2cal), by repeatedly calibrating a fourth‐generation Humidity and Temperature Profiler (HATPRO‐G4) that measures downwelling radiance between 20 GHz and 60 GHz. MiRaCalE revealed two major points to improve MWR calibrations: (i) the necessary repetition frequency for MWR calibration techniques to correct drifts, which ensures stable long‐term measurements; and (ii) the spectral consistency of control measurements of a well known reference is useful to estimate calibration accuracy. Besides, we determined the accuracy of the HATPRO's liquid nitrogen‐cooled blackbody's temperature. TCCs and LN2cals were found to agree within 0.5 K when observing the liquid nitrogen‐cooled blackbody with a physical temperature of 77 K. This agreement of two different calibration techniques suggests that the brightness temperature of the LN2 cooled blackbody is accurate within at least 0.5 K, which is a significant reduction of the uncertainties that have been assumed to vary between 0.6 K and 1.5 K when calibrating the HATPRO‐G4. The error propagation of both techniques was found to behave almost linearly, leading to maximum uncertainties of 0.7 K when observing a scene that is associated with a brightness temperature of 15 K.

A New Method of Tipping Calibration for Ground-Based Microwave Radiometer in Cloudy Atmosphere

Tipping calibration is an important technique for the absolute calibration of ground-based microwave radiometers. The standard tipping calibration is usually used in clear atmosphere. The spatial variations of liquid water in cloudy atmosphere may lead to great calibration errors in the process of standard tipping calibration. A new method of tipping calibration for ground-based microwave radiometers is proposed, which uses an accurate channel to calibrate another inaccurate channel in cloudy atmosphere. The simulation and measurements show that the method proposed here can eliminate the radiation of cloud liquid water and calibrate the radiometer under cloudy-sky conditions effectively. A relative tipping calibration is also introduced to retrieve the parameters in cloudy atmosphere. It has been proven that the relative tipping calibration can reduce the retrieval error significantly in cloudy atmosphere even though neither of the two channels is accurate.

Investigation of ground-based microwave radiometer calibration techniques at 530 hPa

Abstract. Ground-based microwave radiometers (MWR) are becoming more and more common for remotely sensing the atmospheric temperature and humidity profile as well as path-integrated cloud liquid water content. The calibration accuracy of the state-of-the-art MWR HATPRO-G2 (Humidity And Temperature Profiler – Generation 2) was investigated during the second phase of the Radiative Heating in Underexplored Bands Campaign (RHUBC-II) in northern Chile (5320 m above mean sea level, 530 hPa) conducted by the Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) program conducted between August and October 2009. This study assesses the quality of the two frequently used liquid nitrogen and tipping curve calibrations by performing a detailed error propagation study, which exploits the unique atmospheric conditions of RHUBC-II. Both methods are known to have open issues concerning systematic offsets and calibration repeatability. For the tipping curve calibration an uncertainty of ±0.1 to ±0.2 K (K-band) and ±0.6 to ±0.7 K (V-band) is found. The uncertainty in the tipping curve calibration is mainly due to atmospheric inhomogeneities and the assumed air mass correction for the Earth curvature. For the liquid nitrogen calibration the estimated uncertainty of ±0.3 to ±1.6 K is dominated by the uncertainty of the reflectivity of the liquid nitrogen target. A direct comparison between the two calibration techniques shows that for six of the nine channels that can be calibrated with both methods, they agree within the assessed uncertainties. For the other three channels the unexplained discrepancy is below 0.5 K. Systematic offsets, which may cause the disagreement of both methods within their estimated uncertainties, are discussed.

Errors from Rayleigh–Jeans approximation in satellite microwave radiometer calibration systems

The advanced technology microwave sounder (ATMS) onboard the Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership (SNPP) satellite is a total power radiometer and scans across the track within a range of ±52.77° from nadir. It has 22 channels and measures the microwave radiation at either quasi-vertical or quasi-horizontal polarization from the Earth's atmosphere. The ATMS sensor data record algorithm employed a commonly used two-point calibration equation that derives the earth-view brightness temperature directly from the counts and temperatures of warm target and cold space, and the earth-scene count. This equation is only valid under Rayleigh-Jeans (RJ) approximation. Impacts of RJ approximation on ATMS calibration biases are evaluated in this study. It is shown that the RJ approximation used in ATMS radiometric calibration results in errors on the order of 1-2 K. The error is also scene count dependent and increases with frequency.

Analysis on Coherent Antenna Temperature of Aperture Calibration Source

The antenna temperature of a aperture calibration source is a key feature for microwave radiometer calibration,and its coherent part is usually omitted when its incoherent part is used to interpolate the temperature of a measured object.This paper analyses coherent antenna temperature of a low temperature source cooled by liquid nitrogen and a room temperature source.It is given that coherent antenna temperature is a function of an inverse radiating noise temperature from a radiometer,and reflection coefficients of the antenna and calibration sources.A way is obtained to reduce coherent antenna temperature.

A Review:The Calibration of Ground-based,Airborne and Satellite-borne Microwave Radiometers

It has been proven that there exists heat radiation from any object whose temperature is greater than absolute zero by therories and studies.Brightness temperature is usually adopted to describe this radiation characteristic,which varies with the geometry and dielectric characteristics of targets.Microwave radiometer is a category of instrument,which is applied to measure the heat radiation characteristic of one target and very useful in observing the earth from satellite.In fact,it is one receiver with high sensitivity since the radiation signal is extremely weak,even weaker than the receiver background noise.This receiver consists of antenna,broad bandwidth receiver,and data recorder.\;Studies in the past have shown that the collected data are of very confusion if microwave radiometers are not calibrated and validated before application,so microwave radiometer calibration techniques are very important.Microwave radiometers can be utilized on ground-based,airborne and satellite-borne platforms,and there are different demands and difficulties about microwave radiometer calibration accordingly,so it is necessary to discuss the calibration on different platforms.In this paper,the calibration techniques of ground-based,airborne and satellite-borne microwave radiometers are discussed,and some problems are also mentioned.

A New Linearly Polarized Microwave Radiometer Calibration Source

This paper introduces a calibration device for microwave (millimeter and submillimeter) radiometer. The device can provide the microwave radiometer continuously variable linearly polarized noise temperature. The paper also introduces a real-time calibration method to achieve the microwave radiometer calibration, and the test of microwave radiometer sensitivity and linearity.