Novel Low-Impact Integration of a Microwave Radiometer into Cloud Radar System

The purpose of the Novel Low-Impact Integration of a Microwave Radiometer into Cloud Radar System project is a passive channel into the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center's airborne Cloud Radar System (CRS).  This channel will be received at a high data rate along with the radar data to enable careful thresholding of received data during the presence of strong radar signals during post-processing.  The addition of this radiometric feature will provide co-located brightness temperature measurements without impacting the performance of the radar, therefore significantly enhancing the science measurement capability of the instrument.

The radiometer channel will have significant filtering to reduce the contamination of the radar signal into the radiometer channels. The successful isolation between the channels can then be confirmed through correlation calculations between the radar and radiometer data.  After aggressive thresholding and filtering to isolate the radar and radiometer channels, the radiometer data can be averaged to provide a conventional brightness temperature product.