Sea Surface Wind Estimation Using COSMO-SkyMed SAR Imagery

In this study, wind speed is estimated from COSMO-SkyMed (CSK) Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) imagery using two approaches, which both exploit the X-band Geophysical Model Function (GMF) XMOD2 developed for the German TerraSAR-X SAR mission. The first approach uses external wind direction information provided by collocated ASCAT scatterometer measurements; the second one incorporates wind direction derived from the SAR scene using the Continuous Wavelet Transform (CWT). Experimental results, obtained using a relatively small collocated CSK data set, show the robustness of the wind estimation from the CSK imagery that result in accurate enough estimates under a range of incidence angles that span between 30° and 50°. The CWT approach allows reliable wind estimates on a 1km spatial grid.