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The present-day ocean remote sensing instruments that operate at low microwave frequencies are limited in spatial resolution and do not allow for monitoring of the coastal waters. This is due to the difficulties of employing a large reflector antenna on a satellite platform, and generating high-quality pencil beams at multiple frequencies. Recent advances in digital beamforming focal-plane arrays (FPAs) have been exploited in this paper to overcome the above problems. A holistic design procedure for such novel multibeam radiometers has been developed, where: 1) the antenna system specifications are derived directly from the requirements to oceanographic surveys for future satellite missions and 2) the numbers of FPA elements/receivers are determined through a dedicated optimum beamforming procedure minimizing the distance to coast. This approach has been applied to synthesize FPAs for two alternative radiometer systems: a conical scanner with an offset parabolic reflector and a stationary wide-scan torus reflector system, each operating at $C$ -, $X$ -, and Ku-bands. Numerical results predict excellent beam performance for both systems with as low as 0.14% total received power over the land.

Frequent and spatially distributed measurements of soil moisture (SMC), at different spatial scales, are advisable for all applications related to the environmental disciplines, such as climatology, meteorology, hydrology and agriculture. Satellite sensors operating in the low part of microwave spectrum represent an important tool for this purpose, and their signals can be directly related to the moisture content of the observed surfaces, provided that all the contributions from soil and vegetation to the measured signal are properly accounted for. Among the algorithms used for the retrieval of SMC from microwave sensors (both active, such as Synthetic Aperture Radar-SAR, and passive, radiometers), the artificial neural networks (ANN) represent the best compromise between accuracy and computation speed. ANN based algorithms have been developed at IFAC, and adapted to several radar and radiometric satellite sensors, in order to generate SMC products at a resolution varying from hundreds of meters to tens of kilometers (according to the spatial scale of each sensor ). These algorithms, which are based on the ANN techniques for inverting theoretical and semi-empirical models, such as Advanced Integral Equation (AIEM) and Oh models and on Radiative transfer Theory (RTT, in the simplified form of the 'Water-Cloud' model), have been adapted to the C- to Ka- band acquisitions from spaceborne radiometers (AMSR-E/AMSR2), SAR (Envisat/ASAR, Cosmo-SkyMed) and real aperture radar (MetOP ASCAT). Large datasets of co-located satellite acquisitions and direct SMC measurements on several test sites worldwide have been used along with simulations derived from forward electromagnetic models for setting up, training and validating these algorithms. An overall quality assessment of the obtained results in terms of accuracy and computational cost was carried out, and the main advantages and li

This paper introduces the theory of fire detection in moving vehicles by microwave radiometers. The system analysis is discussed and a feasibility study is illustrated on the basis of two implementation hypotheses. The basic idea is to have a fixed radiometer and to look inside the glass windows of the wagon when it passes in front of the instrument antenna. The proposed sensor uses a three-pixel multi-beam configuration that allows an image to be formed by the movement of the train itself. Each pixel is constituted by a direct amplification microwave receiver operating at 31.4 GHz. At this frequency, the antenna can be a 34 cm offset parabolic dish, whereas a 1 K brightness temperature resolution is achievable with an overall system noise figure of 6 dB, an observation bandwidth of 2 GHz and an integration time of 1 ms. The effect of the detector noise is also investigated and several implementation hypotheses are discussed. The presented study is important since it could be applied to the automatic fire alarm in trains and moving vehicles with dielectric wall/windows.