High-Altitude MMIC Sounding Radiometer for the Global Hawk Unmanned Aerial Vehicle

Microwave imaging radiometers operating in the 50–183 GHz range for retrieving atmospheric temperature and water vapor profiles from airborne platforms have been limited in the spatial scales of atmospheric structures that are resolved not because of antenna aperture size, but because of high receiver noise masking the small variations that occur on small spatial scales. Atmospheric variability on short spatial and temporal scales (second/ km scale) is completely unresolved by existing microwave profilers.