The AMSU-B is designed to allow the calculation of the vertical water vapor profiles from the Earth’s surface to about a 200-millibar pressure altitude (12 km or 7.5 mi).

The AMSU-B is a crosstrack, continuous line scanning, total power radiometer and provides measurements of scene radiance in five channels. The instrument has an IFOV of 1.1° (at the halfpower points). Spatial resolution at nadir is nominally 16 km (9.94 mi).The antenna provides a crosstrack scan, scanning ±48.95° from nadir with a total of 90 Earth fields-of-view per scan line. The instrument completes one scan every 2.66 seconds.