On the theory of SAR ocean wave imaging

Ocean wave imaging with a high-resolution synthetic aperture radar (SAR) is considered. It is noted that the imaging is mainly due to a variable number of the subimages of different ocean surface elements superimposed at each image plane point. This mechanism is nonlinear, in principle, acting on the ocean surface represented as a random process. SAR image spectra are calculated for representative values of ocean state and imaging geometry parameters