Study of inversion EM models for wind speed retrieval from Sentinel-1 data

Abstract

Sea surface wind speed plays a key parameter in the studies of many oceanic applications, i.e. meteorological forecasting, oil slick observation, ship detection, and wind turbine installation recently. It can be obtained from many available wind sources, i.e. measured data, numeric weather models, etc. However, one of the most well-known ways is the retrieval of wind speed from Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) data. For this approach, the studies are based on two principal ways: one uses empirical models and the other is based on electromagnetic calculations. In both indicated approaches, the Geophysical Model Functions (GMFs) are used to describe the dependency of radar scattering from sea surface on surface wind speed and the geometry of observations. By knowing radar scattering and geometric parameters from SAR data, it is possible to invert the GMFs to retrieve wind speed. Then, estimated wind speed by two studied models is compared and evaluated with measured data. Based on the comparisons, the advantages and limits of the studied models are analyzed and discussed.