Antenna Pattern Synthesis and Deconvolution of Microwave Radiometer Imaging Data

Since the early years of passive microwave remote sensing of the Earth, many papers have been published on the subjects of antenna side lobe correction and main beam sharpening. This paper shows that the two problems are interrelated, and involve the construction of a "point spread function" from neighboring image pixels generated by a scanning antenna system. As part of this analysis, the effects of retrieval noise are considered. Finally, the paper shows that if the radiometric image is processed to enhance the spatial resolution, sampling at the Nyquist rate results in a perfect deconvolution of the scene brightness temperature, consistent with the results of Shannon\´s sampling theorem