What was the purpose of CIMREx?

ESA Study: "CIMREx" the airborne campaign was initiated by ESA to support the EU Copernicus High Priority Polar Candidate Mission, Copernicus Imaging Microwave Radiometer (CIMR), to sample the sea ice microwave emissions from various sea ice regimes around Svalbard and Greenland.

The CIMREx exercise took place between 28 February - 11 March 2019.

The measurements were carried out with the newly refurbished Finnish HUTRAD 2.0 radiometer, measuring the brightness temperature from the sea ice at various frequencies (6.8, 10.65 and 18.7 GHz) at vertical and horizontal polarisations, providing basic information on the ability for high-resolution measurements of sea ice concentration and related snow/ice properties for the future CIMR satellite.

What was the outcome of CIMREx?

In the work reported in this document, the 6.8 GHz, 10.65, and 18.7 GHz channels of a legacy HUTRAD radiometer system were repaired and refurbished into HUTRAD 2.0 system. As tested, HUTRAD 2.0 works as expected and sufficiently well to perform radiometer measurement with high quality. There are some differences in the radiometric resolution (with respect to results obtained in 1995), mostly and most probably due to the modifications of antennas and front-end components. As tested, the system is ready to be installed on Twin Otter aircraft and to be used for airborne measurements in the Arctic.

Download CIMREx Final Report

Digital Object Identifier: https://doi.org/10.5270/esa-tmopfbm - CIMREx: "Intercomparison of airborne observations with satellite passive microwave and infrared camera measurements."

The campaign data is available online via FTPS upon submission of a data access request. An active EO Sign In account is required to submit the request.

The data can be downloaded via an FTP client (e.g., FileZilla or WinSCP) using the option "Implicit FTP over TLS".

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