Under a grant from NASA under the NASA Innovative Research Program, BYU designed and built YSCAT, an ultra wideband scatterometer system designed for study of the air/sea interface from a tower. This system was deployed on the Canadian Centre for Inland Waters (CCIW) research platform in Lake Ontario for six months and on a Shell Oil platform in the Gulf of Mexico off the Galveston coast for six months.

The system collected single-band 2-18 GHz backscatter measurements and environmental measurements including wind, waves, and temperature.

Experiment Description YSCAT-94 Experiment on Lake Ontario

Photo of CCIW tower

Assembling YSCAT on CCIW tower

Photo of YSCAT location on Shell Oil tower

Instrument high level block diagram

Instrument mechanical system drawing