Retrieval of the Sea-Surface Wind Field from Synthetic Aperture Radar Data

In this paper, the CMOD4 and CMOD_IFR2 models used to derive the wind field from scatterometer data are employed to retrieve the wind vector from SAR data. The quality of the retrieval results of the two models is controlled using the variational method. The results are then compared with those of numerical weather predictions. For moderate wind speeds, the two models provide a highly accurate retrieval of the wind field, with CMOD_IFR2 producing slightly more accurate results than CMOD4.