On the Interpretation of Synthetic Aperture Radar Images of Oceanic Phenomena: Past and Present

Abstract

In 1978, the SEASAT satellite was launched, carrying the first civilian synthetic aperture radar (SAR). The mission was the monitoring of ocean: application to land was also studied. Despite its short operational time of 105 days, SEASAT-SAR provided a wealth of information on land and sea, and initiated many spaceborne SAR programs using not only the image intensity data, but also new technologies of interferometric SAR (InSAR) and polarimetric SAR (PolSAR). In recent years, artificial intelligence (AI), such as deep learning, has also attracted much attention. In the present article, a review is given on the imaging processes and analyses of oceanic data using SAR, InSAR, PolSAR data and AI. The selected oceanic phenomena described here include ocean waves, internal waves, oil slicks, currents, bathymetry, ship detection and classification, wind, aquaculture, and sea ice.