Antenna pattern correction procedures for the Scanning Multichannel Microwave Radiometer /SMMR/

Procedures for correcting antenna temperature measurements and retrieving the true brightness temperatures are developed for the Scanning Multichannel Microwave Radiometer (SMMR) flown on the Seasat-A and Nimbus-G satellites. These procedures are necessary to meet the measurement accuracies required for deriving sea surface temperatures and wind speeds. It is shown that sidelobe contributions and polarization cross-coupling are major effects to be accounted for, in addition to some unique features of the SMMR instrument such as integration times and antenna scan characteristics. Methods are presented for data averaging and data reformatting, these are to be used with geophysical parameter retrieval algorithms.