A Novel RFI Detection Method for Microwave Radiometers Using Multilag Correlators

Radio frequency interference (RFI) is an increasing problem in microwave radiometry, particularly for Earth observation, because the antennas are pointing toward the Earth. RFI has been observed at the L-band in European Space Agency’s (ESA’s) Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity (SMOS) Earth Explorer mission, National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s (NASA’s) Soil Moisture Active and Passive (SMAP) and Aquarius missions, and Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer-Earth Observing System (AMSR-E) and WindSat missions at 10.7 and 18.7 GHz (Misra and de Matthaeis, 2014). Therefore, dedicated onboard systems are, nowadays, a must to detect and remove contaminated measurements, improving radiometric accuracy and increasing the spatial coverage. In this work, a novel detection technique, specially tailored for synthetic aperture interferometric radiometers (SAIRs), is proposed and its performance analyzed. It is based on the change of the shape of the cross correlation function at lags different from zero under the presence of RFI. The performance of the proposed technique is compared to other common RFI detection algorithms, and its limitations and advantages are discussed. Postcorrelation detection performance is found to outperform other commonly used algorithms, such as kurtosis. In addition, it presents some convenient properties for its practical application in correlation and real aperture radiometers.