Airborne L-Band Radio Frequency Interference Observations from the SMAPVEX08 Campaign and Associated Flights James Park, Student Member, IEEE, J
This article has been accepted for inclusion in a future issue of this journal. Content is final as presented, with the exception of pagination. IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON GEOSCIENCE AND REMOTE SENSING 1 Airborne L-Band Radio Frequency Interference Observations From the SMAPVEX08 Campaign and Associated Flights James Park, Student Member, IEEE, J. T. Johnson, Fellow, IEEE, Ninoslav Majurec, Noppasin Niamsuwan, Member, IEEE, Jeffrey R. Piepmeier, Member, IEEE, Priscilla N. Mohammed, Member, IEEE, Christopher S. Ruf, Fellow, IEEE, Sidharth Misra, Simon H. Yueh, Fellow, IEEE, and Steve J. Dinardo, Member, IEEE Abstract—Statistics of radio frequency interference (RFI) ob- The current experience of significant RFI corruption of the served in the band 1398–1422 MHz during an airborne campaign observations of the SMOS radiometer [8], as well as the up- in the United States are reported for use in analysis and forecasting coming deployment of the Aquarius and SMAP missions [11], of L-band RFI for microwave radiometry. The observations were [12] motivate studies of the properties of the RFI environment conducted from September to October 2008, and included approx- imately 92 h of flight time, of which approximately 20 h of “tran- as well as the performance of a variety of RFI detection and sit” or dedicated RFI observing flights are used in compiling the mitigation approaches. statistics presented. The observations used include outbound and A recent work [7] has reported results from an airborne return flights from Colorado to Maryland, as well as RFI surveys L-band RFI observing system in Europe and Australia. The over large cities. The Passive Active L-Band Sensor (PALS) ra- hardware utilized in [7] was capable of implementing algo- diometer of NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory augmented by three rithms for pulsed RFI detection using either a “pulse” or a dedicated RFI observing systems was used in these observations.
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