A simulation study on the atmospheric sounding performance for the future space-borne microwave hyperspectral radiometer

With the development of microwave technology and high speed DSP chips, microwave hyperspectral radiometry has attracted much attention in recent years. Many research organizations have proposed concept or developed prototype radiometers, like the one developed by Beihang University (BHU-Hyper). Its working frequency is within 50∼70GHz for the atmospheric temperature sounding. BHU-Hyper is able to split 50∼70GHz signal into up to 2048 hyperspectral channels with identical bandwidth. Simulation study is done to examine the performance of BHU-Hyper on the space-borne platform from information perspective. The Degree of Freedom for Signal (DFS) of the simulated sounding data with respect to different channel numbers and sensitivity is analyzed. Finally, the temperature retrieval performance of BHU-Hyper is presented, and compared to the operational sounder AMSU. Results show that noticeable improvements compared to AMSU-A can be achieved, suggesting favorable possibility of future space-borne application.