Airborne CoSMIR Observations Between 50 and 183 GHz Over Snow-Covered Sierra Mountains

An airborne Conical Scanning Millimeter-wave Imaging Radiometer (CoSMIR) was developed recently for calibration/validation of the new-generation DMSP F-series microwave radiometer, the Special Sensor Microwave/Imager/Sounder. The CoSMIR is a total-power radiometer that measures radiation at nine channels over the frequency range of 50-183 GHz. The instrument employs a two-axis gimbaled mechanism to generate the conical scan with periodic calibration. Its scan geometry is software programmable and can be designed to serve the scientific requirements of an experiment. A series of CoSMIR flights was conducted over the coastal regions of California in March and December of 2004, in which the instrument was programmed to acquire both conical and across-track scan data sets simultaneously. Two of these flights on March 25 and December 2 contained segments over the snow-covered Sierra Mountain Range and were selected to demonstrate the novel features of this new instrument

[1]  Edward J. Kim,et al.  Measurement of Low Amounts of Precipitable Water Vapor Using Ground-Based Millimeterwave Radiometry , 2005 .

[2]  Jungang Miao,et al.  Atmospheric water vapor over Antarctica derived from Special Sensor Microwave/Temperature 2 data , 2001 .

[3]  Min-Jeong Kim,et al.  A physical model to determine snowfall over land by microwave radiometry , 2004, IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing.

[4]  Will Manning,et al.  Near concurrent MIR, SSM/T-2, and SSM/I observations over snow-covered surfaces , 2003 .

[5]  Paul Racette,et al.  Retrievals of column water vapor using millimeter-wave radiometric measurements , 2002, IEEE Trans. Geosci. Remote. Sens..

[6]  Stephenson Moore,et al.  Determination of integrated water vapor over Antarctica utilizing special sensor microwave temperature-2 (SSM/T- 2) data , 1997 .

[7]  Dorothy K. Hall,et al.  Comparison of snow mass estimates from a prototype passive microwave snow algorithm, a revised algorithm and a snow depth climatology , 1997 .

[8]  J. Wang,et al.  Retrieval of precipitable water using Special Sensor Microwave/Temperature‐2 (SSM/T‐2) millimeter‐wave radiometric measurements , 2003 .

[9]  Paul Racette,et al.  The airborne Conical Scanning Millimeter-wave Imaging Radiometer (CoSMIR) , 2002, IEEE International Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium.

[10]  John Turner,et al.  Antarctic Meteorology and Climatology , 1998 .

[11]  James R. Wang,et al.  Sensitivity of passive microwave snow depth retrievals to weather effects and snow evolution , 2006, IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing.

[12]  Tim J. Hewison,et al.  Airborne retrievals of snow and ice surface emissivity at millimeter wavelengths , 1999, IEEE Trans. Geosci. Remote. Sens..