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Engineering Commons

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Electrical and Computer Engineering

Brigham Young University

Backscatter

2000

Articles 1 - 2 of 2

Full-Text Articles in Engineering

Azimuth Variation In Microwave Scatterometer And Radiometer Data Over Antarctica, David G. Long, Mark R. Drinkwater Jul 2000

Azimuth Variation In Microwave Scatterometer And Radiometer Data Over Antarctica, David G. Long, Mark R. Drinkwater

Faculty Publications

While designed for ocean observation, scatterometer and radiometer data have proven very useful in a variety of cryosphere studies. Over large regions of Antarctica, ice sheet and bedrock topography and the snow deposition, drift, and erosional environment combine to produce roughness on various scales. Roughness ranges from broad, basin-scale ice-sheet topography at 100 km wavelengths to large, spatially coherent dune fields at 10 km wavelength to erosional features on the meter scale known as sastrugi. These roughness scales influence the microwave backscattering and emission properties of the surface, combining to introduce azimuth-angle dependencies in the satellite observation data. In this …


Improved Resolution Backscatter Measurements With The Seawinds Pencil-Beam Scatterometer, David G. Long, Michael W. Spencer, Chialin T. Wu Jan 2000

Improved Resolution Backscatter Measurements With The Seawinds Pencil-Beam Scatterometer, David G. Long, Michael W. Spencer, Chialin T. Wu

Faculty Publications

The SeaWinds scatterometer was launched on the NASA QuikSCAT spacecraft in June 1999 and is planned for the Japanese ADEOS-II mission in 2000. In addition to generating a global Ku-band backscatter data set useful for a variety of climate studies, these flights will provide ocean-surface wind estimates for use in operational weather forecasting. SeaWinds employs a compact "pencil-beam" design rather than the "fan-beam" approach previously used with SASS on Seasat, NSCAT on ADEOS-I, and the AMI scatterometer on ERS-1, 2. As originally envisioned and reported, the resolution of the SeaWinds backscatter measurements were to be antenna-beamwidth limited. In order to …