Estimation of wind on sea surface from polarimetric scattering

A classical method used to obtain the RCS of the sea surface is the small perturbation model. This method is extended to the vectorial case, to obtain the polarimetric signature of the ocean surface, from a classical two-scale surface for sea surface model. An expression of this signature is first given by the sea surface Mueller matrix. The study of the terms of the averaged Mueller matrix shows that the number of coefficients can be reduced to a vector whose dimension is minimal (five). From this defined reduced vector, a Bayes estimator is built (maximum likelihood ratio test), enabling the direction and speed of the wind to be estimated, from an averaging of measurements of the polarimetric sea surface backscattering. A second formalization of the sea surface backscattering signature is proposed, which consists of a backscattering model for a single instantaneous measurement. For this purpose, the instantaneous signature of the sea surface is formalized by a `polarization fork´, which is described by the five Euler parameters