Phase and amplitude calibration of rotating equispaced circular array for geostationary microwave interferometric radiometers: Simulation results and discussion

In the theoretical part of this work, a calibration strategy for both phase and amplitude calibration of rotating equispaced circular array based on redundant space calibration was introduced. It avoids the challenging implementation of conventional noise-injection networks, especially for a large-scale array, by using the strong self-consistency accomplished by array rotation. This study presents comprehensive simulation results of the proposed calibration strategy, where calibration residuals and image reconstruction errors are evaluated. The phase calibration shows outstanding performance, while the amplitude calibration is found to be biased due to the logarithms used to linearize the system of calibration equations, and the resulting image reconstruction bias is scene-dependent. A bias correction method is proposed accordingly, which requires an a priori regional brightness temperature within the observation scene. The performance of both phase and amplitude calibration take advantage of increasing the number of elements, which promises the system scalability for high spatial resolution applications.This work was supported for National Space Science Center’s (NSSC’s) Contribution in part by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant 41675035, in part by the Special Fund for Chinese Meteorological Research in the Public Interest under Grant GYHY201506023, and in part by the Beijing Science Project under Grant Z161100002616033. The Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya’s (UPC’s) Contribution was supported by the Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities, “SPOT: Sensing with Pioneering Opportunistic Techniques,” under Grant RTI2018-099008-BC21/AEI/10.13039/501100011033.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft