Assessment of an analytical model for sea surface wind speed retrieval from spaceborne SAR |
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| Authors: | Qing Xu Hui Lin Xiaofeng Li Juncheng Zuo Quanan Zheng William G Pichel |
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| Affiliation: | 1. College of Traffic, College of Ocean, Hohai University , Nanjing, 210098, China;2. LASG, Institute of Atmospheric Physics, Chinese Academy of Science , Beijing, 100029, China xuqing215@yahoo.com.cn;4. Institute of Space and Earth Information Science, The Chinese University of Hong Kong , Hong Kong;5. IMSG, NOAA/NESDIS , Camp Springs, MD, 20746, USA;6. College of Traffic, College of Ocean, Hohai University , Nanjing, 210098, China;7. Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Science , University of Maryland , College Park, MD, 20742, USA;8. NOAA/NESDIS/STAR , Camp Springs, MD, 20746, USA |
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| Abstract: | An analytical model based on radar backscatter theory was utilized to retrieve sea surface wind speeds from C-band satellite synthetic aperture radar (SAR) data at either vertical (VV) or horizontal (HH) polarization in transmission and reception. The wind speeds were estimated from several ENVISAT Advanced SAR (ASAR) images in Hong Kong coastal waters and from Radarsat-1 SAR images along the west coast of North America. To evaluate the accuracy of the analytical model, the estimated wind speeds were compared to coincident buoy measurements, as well as winds retrieved by C-band empirical algorithms (CMOD4, CMOD_IRF2 and CMOD5). The comparison shows that the accuracy of the analytical model is comparable to that of the C-band empirical algorithms. The results indicate the capability of the analytical model for sea surface wind speed retrieval from SAR images at both VV and HH polarization. |
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