Tradeoffs in the Design of a Spaceborne Scanning Pencil Beam Scatterometer: Application to Sea Winds

摘要

SeaWinds is a spaceborne scatterometer to be flown on the second Japanese Advanced Earth Observation Satellite (ADEOS-II) in 1999. An important international element of NASA's Earth Observing System (EOS), SeaWinds is an advanced follow-on to the NASA scatterometer (NSCAT) on the first ADEOS platform. Unlike previous operational spaceborne scatterometer systems, SeaWinds employs a scanning pencil-beam antenna rather than a fan-beam antenna, making the instrument more compact and yielding greater ocean coverage.