Automated measurement of the temperature of the atmosphere at 3.2 cm

Abstract

Concurrent with measurements of sky temperature reported in companion papers by De Amici et al., Friedman et al., Mandolesi et al., and Sironi et al, we made automated measurements of the temperature contributed by the Earth's atmosphere at 9.4 GHz (3.2-cm wavelength) every 8 min. Typical values for ${T}_{\mathrm{ATM}}$ in clear weather were 1.03\ifmmode\pm\else\textpm\fi{}0.03 K; the total range of recorded values was 0.89-1.24 K. These values were used to provide real-time atmospheric temperature corrections for the spectrum observations described in the companion papers, and to constrain models of the microwave emission of the atmosphere.