Estimation of wind fields in the German Bight from ERS-1 SAR images

Author

Dannenberg, J. ; Klocke, B. ; Schmidt, R.

Author_Institution

Inst. of Environ. Phys., Bremen Univ., Germany

Volume

2

fYear

1999

fDate

1999

Firstpage

983

Abstract

SAR images acquired over the German Bight are used to estimate wind fields over open water. The wind speed is derived from the the normalized radar cross section of the sea surface by applying a backscatter model to the SAR images which was originally developed for wind vector retrieval from ERS scatterometer data (CMOD4). Because of the unique topography of the German coast with its wadden flats, shoals and small islands this well established method does not provide reliable wind field estimations in all parts of the water surface. Therefore the image is segmented using a texture based algorithm. Calculating the average wind speed for each segment and comparing it to wind speed data recorded by weather stations reveals areas with values of the NRCS which can not exclusively be related to the wind field. An influence of the the sea bottom topography has to be considered

Keywords

atmospheric boundary layer; atmospheric techniques; radar cross-sections; radar imaging; remote sensing by radar; synthetic aperture radar; wind; ERS-1 SAR images; German Bight; backscatter model; normalized radar cross section; sea bottom topography; sea surface; texture based algorithm; wind fields; wind speed; Backscatter; Image retrieval; Image segmentation; Information retrieval; Radar cross section; Radar measurements; Sea surface; Surface topography; Synthetic aperture radar; Wind speed;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium, 1999. IGARSS '99 Proceedings. IEEE 1999 International

Conference_Location

Hamburg

Print_ISBN

0-7803-5207-6

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/IGARSS.1999.774506

Filename

774506