EVALUATION OF AN ALGORITHM FOR OPERATIONAL WIND FIELD RETRIEVALFROM SYNTHETIC APERTURE RADAR IMAGES*

摘要

An algorithm is introduced that enables to retrieve high resolution ocean surface windfields from space borne synthetic aperture (SAR) images on an operational basis. Thealgorithm was designed for the European satellites ERS and ENVISAT as well as theCanadian satellite RADARSAT-1 all operating at C-band in either vertical (VV) orhorizontal (HH) polarization in transmit and receive. Derivation of the sea surface windfield is a two step process: In the first step wind directions are retrieved from windinduced streaks, which are a necessary input into the second step to retrieve wind speedsfrom the normalized radar cross section. The algorithms performance is tested utilizingENVISAT SAR data and comparing the resulting wind fields to numerical model results.