Advanced View at the Ocean Surface

Abstract

AbstractImprovement of methods for satellite monitoring of the world ocean state is one of the most important areas of the remote sensing because of the influence the oceans have on the Earth's climate. Currently, only one parameter is measured on a regular basis on a global scale: the significant wave height which is obtained from spaceborne radar altimeter data. It is known that at small incidence angles within the framework of Kirchhoff approximation, the backscattering radar cross section depends mainly on the mean square slope (mss) of the sea surface; therefore, this parameter can be measured. The performed studies lead to the improvement of the methods for processing the data from a precipitation radar. We demonstrate that the mss of the large‐scale (compared to the radar wavelength) sea waves can be restored within the swath, that is, about 115 km wide. The aim of this work is to communicate these new possibilities to the broad research community involved in the studies of the oceans. In this paper, a review of the results is performed and the prospects for global monitoring are first shown. On the basis of the precipitation radar data, it becomes possible to measure global fields of sea wave slopes, which in turn will help scientists to analyze the processes of air‐sea interaction. Availability of this new mss parameter essentially doubles the amount of available descriptors of sea waves, which will advance the understanding of the processes occurring in the oceans.