Mitigation of cross-polar antenna pattern errors in SMOS: simplified approach

Abstract

This paper analyzes a simplified image reconstruction method that exclusively takes into account the dominant antenna pattern terms to model image inversion artifacts and mitigate SMOS polarimetric spatial bias over the Ocean. This simplified method, that reduces computation time at the cost of small radiometric performance degradation, is useful to the L1 teams to process a large amount of data when full radiometric accuracy is not required (e.g. stability assessments).