A High-Resolution Full-Earth Disk Model for Evaluating Synthetic Aperture Passive Microwave Observations From GEO

A proposed instrument for deployment on next-generation Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite (GOES) platforms is the Geostationary Synthetic Thinned Aperture Radiometer (GeoSTAR). A high-resolution full-Earth disk model has been developed to aid in the design of the instrument and to characterize sensor performance. A number of ancillary geophysical data fields are used as inputs into a radiative-transfer model that also accounts for the propagation and viewing geometries from a geostationary Earth orbit (GEO). The model produces high-resolution (10 km times 10 km) simulated full-Earth disk microwave images from GEO. The model is used as a tool to examine several critical aspects of GeoSTAR performance and design. Differential image processing is assessed as a means of mitigating the effects of the Gibbs phenomenon; its performance is found to be excellent, even with nonideal a priori information. The spatial resolution and precision of images generated at 50 GHz are evaluated. The magnitude of the highest spatial-frequency components sampled by GeoSTAR is found to be well above its minimum detectable signal. However, the differential image processing removes most of the high-frequency content, which is due to static high-contrast boundaries in the scene. Most of the residual high-frequency content lies at or below the instrument noise floor.