Performance of the SSM/T-2 moisture sensor on DMSP S12. Part II: post-June 1993 anomaly

摘要

On 20 June 1993, an anomaly was noticed in the 150 GHz channel on the DMSP SSM/T-2 water vapor profiler. This anomaly left the moisture sounder software inoperable, but with several options available for restoring it to operability, albeit with degraded performance. The built-in flexibility of the ground processing software to accommodate this type of anomaly reduced both lost data and repair time. Extension and augmentation of the pre- failure calibration/validation study results have produced new average performance statistics which establish that the SSM/T-2 moisture sounder performance is still acceptable to most users under most conditions. In this paper we describe the on-orbit performance of the repaired moisture sounding system compared with pre-failure performance, and with expected performance. The salient facts of the hardware failure and options for ground software fixes are also described.