WindSat SDR and EDR on orbit calibration and validation

The Coriolus spacecraft was successfully launched on 6 January 2003. Its primary payload is the WindSat fully polarimetric radiometer. WindSat is a first-of-its-kind instrument that will remotely sense the speed and direction of near surface winds over the ocean by measuring the partial correlation between orthogonally polarized components of natural thermal emission radiated by the ocean surface at microwave frequencies. The ability of WindSat to successfully retriece wind vector depends critically on two issues, hardware calibration of the four Stokes brightness temperatures and the relationship between those TBs and the ocean surface wind vector. An approach is described to detecting and estimating possible errors in both the hardware calibration and forward model based on a new type of statistical analysis of the on-orbit radiometer measurements.