A Digital-Simulation Model for a Full-Polarized Microwave Radiometer System and Its Calibration

A digital-correlation full-polarized microwave radiometer is an important passive remote sensor, as it can obtain the amplitude and phase information of an electromagnetic wave at the same time. It is widely used in the measurement of sea surface wind speed and direction. Its configuration is complicated, so the error analysis of the instrument is often difficult. This paper presents a full-polarized radiometer system model that can be used to analyze various errors, which include input signal models and a full-polarized radiometer (receiver) model. The input signal models are generated by WGN (white Gaussian noise), and the full-polarized radiometer model consists of an RF front-end model and digital back-end model. The calibration matrix is obtained by solving the overdetermined equations, and the output voltage is converted into Stokes brightness temperature through the calibration matrix. Then, we use the four Stokes parameters to analyze the sensitivity, linearity, and calibration residuals, from which the simulation model is validated. Finally, two examples of error analysis, including gain imbalance and quantization error, are given through a simulation model. In general, the simulation model proposed in this paper has good accuracy and can play an important role in the error analysis and pre-development of the fully polarized radiometer.