Optimal Estimation of Calibration Parameters in Polarimetric Microwave Radiometers

Methods for internal calibration of a certain class of microwave polarimetric radiometers are presented by Piepmeier. In that work, the calibration parameters are estimated algebraically. We demonstrate that Bayesian estimation decreases the root-mean-square error of the estimates by a factor of two. This improvement is obtained by using knowledge of the noise structure of the measurements and by utilizing all of the information provided by the measurements. Drawbacks are the increased complexity of the method and an increase in computation. We also extend the method to estimate several hardware component parameters of interest in system calibration.