Improving the Spatial Resolution of Synthetic Aperture Radiometer Imagery using Auxiliary Information: Application to the Smos Mission

The SMOS (Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity) mission is an Earth Explorer Opportunity Mission from the European Space Agency that will be launched in Spring 2009. SMOS´ single payload is a new type of radiometer called MIRAS (Microwave Imaging Radiometer by Aperture Synthesis) operating at L-band in which brightness temperature (BT) images are formed by a Fourier synthesis technique. The spatial resolution of the retrieved BT (~50 km), although appropriate for climate studies, is insufficient for most hydrological studies. Current pixel disaggregation approaches are based on iterative procedures in the BT images or in image deconvolution A technique is presented to improve the spatial resolution of the BT imagery by adding the information in the Fourier domain, instead of An updated overview of the current status of the image reconstruction algorithms in 2D Aperture Synthesis Radiometers for Earth Observation, with special emphasis in the SMOS mission is presented.