The Superconducting Submillimeter‐Wave Limb‐Emission Sounder (SMILES) was successfully launched and attached to the Japanese Experiment Module (JEM) on the International Space Station (ISS) on 25 September 2009. It has been making atmospheric observations since 12 October 2009 with the aid of a 4 K mechanical cooler and superconducting mixers for submillimeter limb‐emission sounding in the frequency bands of 624.32–626.32 GHz and 649.12–650.32 GHz . On the basis of the observed spectra, the data processing has been retrieving vertical profiles for the atmospheric minor constituents in the middle atmosphere, such as O3 with isotopes, HCl, ClO, HO2, BrO, and HNO3. Results from SMILES have demonstrated its high potential to observe atmospheric minor constituents in the middle atmosphere. Unfortunately, SMILES observations have been suspended since 21 April 2010 owing to the failure of a critical component.

It can be delineated from these results that Bragg scattering as well as specular reflection contribute to the backscattered radar signal at low incidence angles (up to 30ø). It is concluded that at low to moderate wind speeds, multifrequency radar techniques seem to be capable of discriminating between the different surface films, whereas at high wind conditions a discrimination seems to be difficult.

An airborne microwave scatterometer‐radiometer system operated in X band and Ka band was applied to the observations of microwave backscattering signatures of the ocean. The normalized radar cross sections σ0 were measured as combined functions of microwave frequency (10.00 GHz and 34.43 GHz), polarization (HH and VV), incident angle (0°–70°), azimuth angle (0°–360°), and wind speed (3.2–17.2 m/s). The azimuth anisotropic signatures for Ka band are confirmed to be similar to those for X band, and the wind speed dependences are analyzed for each azimuth angle, polarization, and incident angle. For each parameter the behaviors of σ0 for microwave frequencies is shown as compared with the results obtained by other experiments and theories. The effective reflection coefficient, the mean square surface slope, and the two‐dimensional wave number spectrum of the short surface waves are estimated from the microwave scattering signatures.

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