Retrieval of wind with spaceborne SAR for polar oceans and coastal regions

Research Project, 2013 – 2015

This project was developed to evaluate and improve the performance of an algorithm for wind retrieval with Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) data. Due to the fact that the most restrictive conditions for the algorithm performance were expected in coastal areas and in areas with special features (e.g. wind shadowing, sea ice, oil spill) a special evaluation of the algorithm for these conditions was performed.

The results from the study indicate that the accuracy of the wind direction retrievals is limited by the geographical location of the data and the environmental conditions. Thus a selective method for using either SAR derived wind directions or wind directions from a weather prediction model is proposed. In both cases, the wind directions are used to invert the wind speeds from a backscatter model of the SAR data.