TITLE:
Exploitation of Electromagnetic Models for Sea Wind Speed Estimation from C-Band Sentinel-1 Images
AUTHORS:
Tran Vu La, Ali Khenchaf, Fabrice Comblet, Carole Nahum, Helmi Ghanmi
KEYWORDS:
C-Band Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR), Electromagnetic (EM) Scattering Models, Radar Cross-Section (RCS), Remote Sensing, Small Perturbation Model (SPM), Sea Surface Wind
JOURNAL NAME:
Journal of Electromagnetic Analysis and Applications,
Vol.8 No.3,
March
30,
2016
ABSTRACT: Among the different available wind sources, i.e. in situ measurements, numeric weather models, the retrieval of wind speed from Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) data is one of the most widely used methods, since it can give high wind resolution cells. For this purpose, one can find two principal approaches: via electromagnetic (EM) models and empirical (EP) models. In both approaches, the Geophysical Model Functions (GMFs) are used to describe the relation of radar scattering, wind speed, and the geometry of observations. By knowing radar scattering and geometric parameters, it is possible to invert the GMFs to retrieve wind speed. It is very interesting to compare wind speed estimated by the EM models, general descriptions of radar scattering from sea surface, to the one estimated by the EP models, specific descriptions for the inverse problem. Based on the comparisons, some ideas are proposed to improve the performance of the EM models for wind speed retrieval.