A newly developed ocean significant wave height retrieval method from Envisat ASAR wave mode imagery

Abstract

The main objective of this paper is to propose a newly developed ocean Significant Wave Height (SWH) retrieval method from Envisat Advanced Synthetic Aperture Radar (ASAR) imagery. A series of wave mode imagery from January, April and May of 2011 are collocated with ERA-Interim reanalysis SWH data. Based on the matched datasets, a simplified empirical relationship between 22 types of SAR imagery parameters and SWH products is developed with the Genetic Algorithms Partial Least-Squares (GA-PLS) model. Two major features of the backscattering coefficient S10 and the frequency parameter S10 are chosen as the optimal training feature subset of SWH retrieval by using cross validation. In addition, we also present a comparison of the retrieval results of the simplified empirical relationship with the collocated ERA-Interim data. The results show that the assessment index of the correlation coefficient, the bias, the root-mean-square error of cross validation (RMSECV) and the scattering index (SI) are 0.78, 0.07 m, 0.76 m and 0.5, respectively. In addition, the comparison of the retrieved SWH data between our simplifying model and the Jason-2 radar altimeter data is proposed in our study. Moreover, we also make a comparison of the retrieval of SWH data between our developed model and the wellknown CWAVE_ENV model. The results show that satisfying retrieval results are acquired in the low-moderate sea state, but major bias appears in the high sea state, especially for SWH>5 m.