Antenna pattern correction for the Nimbus-7 SMMR

This paper describes the philosophy and method used to develop the antenna pattern correction (APC) algorithm that was used on the data from the Scanning Multichannel Microwave Radiometer (SMMR) on Nimbus-7. There are limitations on what can be accomplished with such a procedure; these limitations are explored with the aid of Fourier analysis, even though the algorithm used on the SMMR data does not perform any Fourier transforms. The resulting analysis showed that, for the SMMR instrument, no useful improvement could be made in the data in terms of reduction of side lobes, but the quality of the sea surface temperature retrievals could be improved considerably by matching the antenna beamwidths at the different frequencies.