Performance analysis for the SeaWinds scatterometer

The difficulties of accommodating traditional fan-beam scatterometers on spacecraft has lead to the development of a scanning pencil-beam instrument known as SeaWinds. SeaWinds will be part of the Japanese Advanced Earth Observing System II (ADEOS-II) to be launched in 1999. A brief description of the SeaWinds design, signal processing, and backscatter measurement approach is given in this paper. To analyze the performance of the SeaWinds design, a new expression for the measurement accuracy of a pencil-beam system is used which includes the effects of transmit signal modulation. Performance tradeoffs made in the development of SeaWinds are discussed.