Study for external calibration method for Cloud Profiling Radar on EarthCARE

EarthCARE mission has objectives to reveal aerosol and cloud interaction and to reveal relationships with radiation budget. For this purpose, the EarthCARE satellite has four instruments, which are Atmospheric LIDAR (ATLID), Multi Spectral Imager (MSI) and Broad Band Radiometer (BBR) in addition to Cloud Profiling Radar (CPR). CPR is developed under cooperation of National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT) and Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) in Japan.

The requirement of sensitivity is -35dBZ, therefore CPR uses W-band frequency and needs a large (2.5m) antenna reflector. The large antenna has small footprint and is to give up antenna scanning. From this, some difficulty of external calibration using active radar calibrator (ARC) is recognized.

One solution of external calibration is using scattering from natural distributed target, such as sea surface. Then the measurement of sea surface scattering using airborne cloud radar was performed. The sea surface scattering property is being prepared. Second solution is that ARC puts on exact location of sub-satellite track. Precise sub-satellite track prediction is necessary. We focus second solution in this paper. The test experiment was demonstrated using CloudSat of NASA/JPL, which is provided CPR using W-band frequency. The feasibility of this calibration method is discussed.