SAIRPS: A generic simulator for evaluation of synthetic aperture interferometric radiometers

ESA's SMOS mission has been a cornerstone in passive Earth Observation, since it has provided for the first time ever with global and frequent observations of Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity (where the mission acronym comes from). SMOS' single payload is MIRAS: the Microwave Imaging Radiometers by Aperture Synthesis in two dimensions. After SMOS' success, today, a number of instruments are planned or under study: the GeoStar instrument is the baseline payload for the Precipitation and All-weather Temperature and Humidity (PATH) mission from NASA (USA), the Geostationary Atmospheric Sounder (GAS) instrument is under study for post-MSG operational satellites observations (Europe), and the Geostationary Interferometric Microwave Sounder (GIMS) instrument from NSSC-CAS (China). The study of the instrument performance in terms of angular resolution and radiometric performance (radiometric sensitivity and accuracy), and the optimization of this new type of instruments is a complex task that requires dedicated ad-hoc tools. In this work the SAIRPS (Synthetic Aperture Interferometric Radiometer Performance Simulator) is presented. This complex simulator allows to analyze arbitrary receiver topologies, arbitrary array geometries, and includes noise injection calibration algorithms, and new external robust calibration algorithms, and image reconstruction algorithms that allow to evaluate the performance of almost any instrument. At present, the full simulator has been coded in Matlab, translated into C++, and integrated in OpenSF. This work summarizes the key aspects of the architecture of this simulator, completing the presentation made in IGARSS 2012, and presents a few examples of the simulation results using different instrument configurations.