Microwave radiometers are a form of application-specific radio receivers that are designed to be highly sensitive for the purposes of measuring changes in microwave emission, relative to the background, which are on the orders of femtowatts (10^–12) and picowatts (10^–9), respectively. While commercial off-the-shelf RF design tools can simulate basic radiometer topologies, these solutions cannot properly characterize modern, advanced radiometer architectures to the fidelity necessary to produce science-quality instruments. To this end, we are developing a modular radiometer system model that addresses key gaps in general purpose design tools, thus providing an open-source, digital engineering toolbox that can be interfaced with AI/ML and can be extended to meet evolving community needs.

• Flexible and adaptive system model that provides high-fidelity estimates of performance and separation of noise contributions and other artifacts impacting both accuracy and precision of microwave radiometers
• Modular simulator that produces realistic synthetic microwave radiometer observations to demonstrating the scientific impact of instrument concepts
• Intelligent and predictive framework that accelerates design optimization from overall system topology down to component selection