The primary design of advanced ground-based atmospheric microwave sounder and retrieval of physical parameters

This paper introduces a prototype of ground-based atmospheric microwave sounder that operates in K-band from 22 to 31 GHz and V-band from 51 to 59 GHz. Different from the MP3000A and RPG, the sounder adopts independent dual-band reflectors instead of sharing a dual-band reflector. The direct detect type receiver is applied, which is of smaller size, higher sensitivity, efficient data observing and lower nonlinear error than the widely used superheterodyne receiver. The observing brightness temperatures from this prototype agree well with the simulated brightness temperatures according to the ground-based radiative transfer theory. We use the artificial neural network (ANN) algorithm to retrieve temperature profiles, which has higher spatial resolution especially in the capping inversion when compared with the linear regression algorithm. The temperature retrievals are comparable with the retrievals from RPG and MP3000A retrieval models and have a smaller bias in some certain regions.