Fetch and wind dependence of SAR azimuth cutoff and higher order statistics in a mistral wind case

Fetch dependence of SAR azimuth cutoff and image statistics on ERS-1 SAR images is discussed. Azimuth cutoff accounts for motions on sea surface and is a kinematic parameter. Wind estimation through cutoff analysis is presented as well as limitations of this method for fetch limited sea states. In addition, SAR higher order statistics have proved to be well correlated with estimated SAR azimuth cutoffs. Their behaviour are presented together with breaking events density probability. A first attempt is proposed to better localize the short lifetime scatterers that are expected to arise and fade within the integration time by bandpass filtering the Doppler spectrum derived from a SLC image