The Aquarius mission is also trying to identify and Flag RFIs.Paolo de Matthaeis is producing monthly RFI maps for BOTH the active and passive L band systems on board Aquarius they can be seen here for the radiometer and here for the scatterometer.

It is interesting to compare them to the SMOS ones even though they are not established exactly in the same way (but we are working on it!) We see for instance that over land the number of RFI is higher for Aquarius, probably due to a larger bandwidth (TBC) collecting more out of band (OoB) emissions.

Comparing these RFI maps is not really possible quantitatively as they do not show the same features , but we can never the less see the high correlations between the two radiometer estimates as well as the non negligible impact on active measurements.

For more details go here for Aquarius and there for SMOS

radiometer_RFI_June_2013

Aquarius Radiometer RFI for June 2013

scatterometer_RFI_June_2013Aquarius Scatterometer RFI for June 2013

smos-Proba_RFI_A_20130610_20130624_BB

SMOS probability of RFI for 15 Days in June 2013 – Ascending orbits only

Finally we are also producing maps of emitter characterization at any given time, giving their apparent strength in K, the number of time they were observed and their location (1-7 km accuracy). An example is shown below.

SMOS-RFI_info_20130610SMOS RFI Characterisation for 15 days in June 2013

All this new stuff will be posted on the blog soon… Stay tuned

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