A New Metric for Estimating the Disparity of Antenna Patterns in Synthetic Aperture Imaging Radiometry

The soil moisture and ocean salinity (SMOS) satellite has provided for about ten years systematic passive L-band measurements from space. For several months, phase 0 studies are conducted by the French space agency for a second-generation high resolution (HR) follow-on mission. This contribution is making the connection between this SMOShr project and the SMOS mission by revisiting the following problematic: the impact of the disparity of the antenna patterns on the reconstruction floor error observed in the retrieved brightness temperatures. This impact is revisited in light of the progress made since that time and a new metric is introduced for estimating the disparity between antenna patterns. It would be helpful for the design of future missions based on imaging by aperture synthesis with interferometric arrays comprising a large number of antennas.