The extraction of ocean wind, wave, and current parameters using SAR imagery

Recently satellite SAR techniques have become essential observation tools for various ocean phenomena such as wind, wave and current. The CMOD4 and CMOD-IFR2 models are used to calculate the magnitude of wind at SAR resolution with no directional information. Combination of the wave-SAR spectrum analysis and the inter-look cross-spectra techniques provides amplitude and direction of the ocean wave over a square-km sized imagette. The Doppler shift measurement of SAR image yields surface speed of the ocean current along the radar looking direction at imagette resolution. In this paper we report the development of a SAR Ocean Processor (SOP) incorporating all of these techniques. We have applied the SOP to several RADARSAT-1 images along the coast of Korean peninsula and compared the results with oceanographic data, which showed reliability of space-borne SAR based oceanographic research.