The European Space Agency's campaign, RENE'91, for the geophysical calibration and validation of its ERS-1 satellite took place in the Haltenbanken area of the Norwegian Sea in the Autumn of 1991. A primary objective was to collocate surface wind measurements over the sea with normalized radar cross section (0) measurements from the ERS-1 Scatterometer, in order to establish a radar sea-echo model from space derived data. The scatterometer's three-beam 0 products from 77 orbits were merged with 10 metre height, neutral stability, wind vector estimates from a field analysis program which combined aircraft, buoy, ship, and meteorological background field measurements. To provide enough data to study 0 against the main physical variables, raw 0 values were classified (binned) into ranges of incidence angle (), wind speed (v), and wind direction with respect to the scatterometer beam (), and a bin average 0 calculated for used in subsequent analysis. A by-product was lower noise and data volume. The Haltenban...