Mapping High-Resolution Wind Fields Using Synthetic Aperture Radar

Abstract

The long-term goal of the research effort discussed in this article is to determine the feasibility of obtaining quantitative information about the near-surface field and perhaps other parameters that characterize the marine atmospheric boundary layer from an analysis of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imagery. Because of its potential for yielding such information at high spatial resolution, this application of SAR would complement measurements from most scatterometer and passive microwave sensors that yield only coarse-resolution estimates of the field. Furthermore, we believe that the resulting wind image derived from SAR can provide a useful diagnostic tool for assessing errors in measurements from the coarse-resolution sensors. In this article, we discuss our initial attempts to extract high-resolution field maps from Radarsat imagery off the East Coast of the United States.