High-Resolution Imaging of Radiation Brightness Temperature Obtained by Drone-Borne Microwave Radiometer

Abstract

A digital automatic gain compensation (AGC) drone-borne K-band microwave radiometer with continuous high-speed acquisition and fast storage functions is designed and applied to obtain high-resolution radiation brightness temperature (TB) images. In this paper, the composition of the drone-borne passive microwave observation system is introduced, a data processing method considering the topography and angle correction is proposed, the error analysis of the projection process is carried out, and finally, a high-resolution microwave radiation TB image is obtained by a demonstration area experiment. The characteristics of the radiometer are tested by experiments, and the standard deviation of the TB is 1K. The data processing method proposed is verified using a demonstration case. The corrected data have a good correlation with the theoretical values, of which the R2 is 0.87. A high-resolution radiation TB image is obtained, and the results show the TB characteristics of different objects well. The boundary of the ground object is closer to the real value after correction.

Keywords

• high-resolution imaging
• drone-borne microwave radiometer
• brightness temperature data processing
• topographic correction
• angular correction