By Wade Albright
Alaska SAR Facility
March 04

RADIOMETRIC ERROR.................................................................................................................................. 7 ABSOLUTE LOCATION ACCURACY............................................................................................................... 7 NOISE FLOOR ISSUES................................................................................................................................... 8

Radiometric calibration is necessary to remove the effects of errors introduced at different points in signal
collection and processing. Signal received at the antenna is greatly affected by the antenna gain pattern.
Thermal noise bias of the signal intensity also may introduce errors. Gain in the system is unknown, and
therefore, image brightness is indeterminate for uncalibrated products. The Technical Services Office
(TSO) at the Alaska Satellite Facility (ASF) radiometrically calibrates products, correcting for the above
effects, to yield products that reflect truth to within specifications and to as narrow a statistical distribution
as possible.

Two types of ground targets were used for calibration and analysis: corner reflectors for impulse response measurements and rainforest for radiometric analysis. ASF maintains an array of corner reflectors in Delta Junction, Alaska for the purpose of measuring impulse response functions. These corner reflectors supply a bright target of known quantity for image quality analysis.

Corner
Reflectors
(point)

Normally for a radiometric calibration effort the Amazon rainforest is used for distributed target analysis,
because it has isotropic backscatter,γ0 is well known (-6.5 ±1 dB), it is stable temporally and spatially, and
it is relatively uniform. However, until recently, there has not been a receiving ground station with the
Amazon rainforest within its mask. Historically we have been able to get around this problem by putting
the data on RADARSAT’S onboard recorder (OBR). Unfortunately, SWA is too large to fit on the
recorder, therefore we were unable to obtain Amazon rainforest data to perform the calibration. After an
analysis of the ASF archive, we found a useful dataset over the rainforests of Borneo received from the
Singapore ground station. While the site in Borneo is not as large or quite as uniform as the Amazon, we
found it was useful when used in conjunction with calibrated ScanSAR Wide B (SWB) data over the same
area.

The datasets identified in Table 2 represent the images used in the SWA calibration effort. Ideally the
radiometric dataset would include at least three independent images per direction (ascending and
descending). Regrettably, the unusual size of an SWA image restricted our feasible datasets to the images
listed below. While not perfect, we believe that the calibration derived from these images represents a
suitable approximation of the radiometric variances due to the satellite’s antenna.