An application of SFIM technique to enhance the spatial resolution of spaceborne microwave radiometers

Microwave radiometers operating from space are one of the most promising tools for soil, snow and vegetation monitoring, due to the sensitivity of the measured emission to surface features and to the extended and recursive earth's observation. However, these potentials are partially hampered by the low(coarse) spatial resolution, which is of the order of tens of kilometers, especially at the lower frequencies. This paper describes the results of a simple method for enhancing the spaceborne radiometers spatial resolution, based on the smoothing filter-based intensity modulation technique (SFIM), applied to the AMSR-E data collected on some reference targets, including Amazon river basin, Victoria lake in Africa and Antarctic plateau.