Designing a Climate-Monitoring Microwave Radiometer

The Climate-Monitoring Microwave Radiometer (CliMMR) will address the requirements for measuring long-term trends in atmospheric temperature with excellent stability and linearity, and very low antenna sidelobe contributions. CliMMR would also serve as an on-orbit calibration standard for weather-satellite instruments. Small satellites in carefully chosen non-sun-synchronous orbits could compile a diurnal-cycle climatology of temperature, to reduce uncertainties in the past satellite temperature record.