Abstract
The Kuroshio is the strongest warm current in the western North Pacific, which plays a crucial role in climate and human activities. In terms of this, the accurate acquisition of ocean surface current velocity and direction in the Kuroshio region is of great research value. Gaofen-3 synthetic aperture radar (SAR) provides data support for the study of ocean surface current measurements in the Kuroshio region, but no relevant experimental result has been published yet. In this paper, four available stripmap mode SARs’ data acquired by Gaofen-3 in the Kuroshio region are used for measuring the ocean surface current field. In general, the Doppler centroid anomaly (DCA) estimation is a common method to infer ocean surface currents from single-antenna stripmap data, but only the radial velocity component can be retrieved. In order to measure current vectors, a novel method combining the sub-aperture processing and the least squares (LS) technology is suggested and demonstrated by applying to the Gaofen-3 SAR data processing. The experiment’s results agree well with model-derived ocean current data, indicating that the Gaofen-3 SAR has the capability to accurately retrieve the ocean surface current field in the Kuroshio region and motivate further research by providing more data.
Highlights
The in-situ data derived by Argos drifter buoys, current meters, and so forth, is optimally used for the verification of ocean current results
hybrid coordinate ocean model (HYCOM)’s global reanalysis dataset with a spatial resolution of 1/12◦ and a temporal resolution of 1 day is acquired for comparison
The work in this paper focuses on using the Gaofen-3 synthetic aperture radar (SAR) data to carry out application research on the ocean surface current measurement in the Kuroshio region
Summary
Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Current is ubiquitous in the global ocean, the information about which is valuable in many applications. The circulation current in different regions of the deep ocean will exchange material and energy, which is of great importance for the global climate process. Monitoring currents in the coastal waters is conducive to navigation, offshore oil and gas field development, fishery resources management, and so forth. According to the data requirements survey report on oceanic variables issued by EuroGOOS, the ocean surface current velocity and direction were the two most requested [1]. It is necessary to investigate various methods for measuring the velocity and direction values of the ocean current field. Compared with the in-situ current measurement tools, such as drift buoy and current meter, which are time-consuming and limited in spatial measurement range, the spaceborne synthetic aperture radar (SAR) has become a vital tool for ocean remote sensing mainly due to its day/night and quasi-all-weather capability and its high-spatial resolution [2]
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