Wind retrieval over the China Seas using satellite synthetic aperture radar

The high spatial resolution and large coverage of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) offers a good opportunity to retrieve detailed wind vector information over the oceans, especially in the coast areas. In the work presented here, the wind speeds estimate is based on the data from ScanSAR aboard the Canadian satellite RADARSAT, operating at C-band with horizontal polarization, and the empirically derived CMOD4 model. Because the CMOD4 model was originally developed for the C-band, W-polarized scatterometer data, polarization ratio should be applied to process RADARSAT ScanSAR data. In order to get an estimate of a suitable polarization ratio, wind directions from the collocated QuikSCAT data in the China Seas were taken as input to CMOD4 model for wind speeds retrieval from RADARSAT ScanSAR data, the results of the comparison of wind speeds from QuikSCAT versus the RADARSAT ScanSAR derived wind speeds indicate that Kirchhoff polarization ratio is suitable for wind speeds retrieval using horizontal polarization RADARSAT ScanSAR data. The corresponding mean bias and standard deviation is 0.37m/s and 1.54m/s, respectively