Experimental Study on Radiometric Performance of Synthetic Aperture Radiometer HUT-2D—Measurements of Natural Targets

This paper describes the analysis of L-band radiometric measurement data gathered with the synthetic aperture radiometer HUT-2D during several ground-based and airborne measurement campaigns. The radiometric data are analyzed from the instrument´s performance point of view, aiming to verify the theoretical performance of an instrument of this kind and to assess the performance of the HUT-2D radiometer system in particular. The data sets considered for the study consist of measurements of well-known natural targets, such as cosmic background radiation, and measurements of pure water scenes, the brightness temperature of which is possible to model based on in situ measurements. We define four figures of merit, which are applicable for synthetic aperture radiometers. These are radiometric resolution, image bias, pixel-to-pixel random error, and temporal stability. Then, we use the selected data sets to assess these in the case of HUT-2D. The experimental results are discussed and compared to the theoretical values, where applicable. Also, we discuss possibilities to improve the presented performance. The main results of this paper are the consolidated performance parameters of the HUT-2D instrument. We study and discuss the properties of the error components related to the technology in a general level, and study the scalability of the errors as a function of the measured targets. In particular, the stability of the direction-dependent error component is pointed out, and a mitigation guideline is proposed.