Initial Results from Airborne Tests of the Compact Midwave Imaging System

The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (JHU/APL) conducted airborne tests of the Compact Midwave Imaging System (CMIS) on the NASA Langley Research Center (LaRC) Gulfstream III in October 2019. CMIS was designed with funding from the NASA ESTO Instrument Incubator Program (IIP) to be a small-size, -weight, and -power (SWaP) instrument suite that provides radiometrically calibrated multi-spectral, multi-angle wide-field-of-view (WFOV) observations in the shortwave-midwave infrared (SWIR/MWIR) of clouds, aerosols, and other particulates. CMIS utilizes a high-operating temperature (HOT) focal plane array, which requires less cooling and less power than traditional systems. The low resources required for CMIS allow it to be accommodated on smaller spacecraft such as CubeSats, which potentially enables a multi-satellite constellation to meet NASA science objectives for high spatial- and high temporal-resolution observations of the planetary boundary layer (PBL). The goal of the airborne test campaign was to demonstrate the capability of the instrument to retrieve atmospheric motion vectors and cloud-top heights in the PBL. This presentation will discuss initial results from the airborne campaign and compare them with radiosonde reports and coincident space-based observations.