Coastal wind field retrieval from polarimetric synthetic aperture radar

Abstract

Coastal winds are strongly influenced by topology and discontinuity between land and sea surfaces. Wind assessment from remote sensing in such a complex area remains a challenge. Space-borne scatterometer does not provide any information about the coastal wind field, as the coarse spatial resolution hampers the radar backscattering. Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) with a high spatial resolution and all-weather observation abilities has become one of the most important tools for ocean wind retrieval, especially in the coastal area. Conventional methods of wind field retrieval from SAR, however, require wind direction as initial information, such as the wind direction from numerical weather prediction models (NWP), which may not match the time of SAR image acquiring. Fortunately, the polarimetric observations of SAR enable independent wind retrieval from SAR images alone. In order to accurately measure coastal wind fields, this paper proposes a new method of using co-polarization backscattering coefficients from polarimetric SAR observations up to polarimetric correlation backscattering coefficients, which are acquired from the conjugate product of co-polarization backscatter and cross-polarization backscatter. Co-polarization backscattering coefficients and polarimetric correlation backscattering coefficients are obtained form Radarsat-2 single-look complex (SLC) data.The maximum likelihood estimation is used to gain the initial results followed by the coarse spatial filtering and fine spatial filtering. Wind direction accuracy of the final inversion results is 10.67 with a wind speed accuracy of 0.32 m/s. Unlike previous methods, the methods described in this article utilize the SAR data itself to obtain the wind vectors and do not need external wind directional information. High spatial resolution and high accuracy are the most important features of the method described herein since the use of full polarimetric observations contains more information about the space measured. This article is a useful addition to the work of independent SAR wind retrieval. The experimental results herein show that it is feasible to employ the co-polarimetric backscattering coefficients and the polarimetric correlation backscattering coefficients for coastal wind field retrieval.