Estimation of the Sea-Surface Slope Variance Based on the Power Spectrum Width of a Radar Scatterometer

In this letter, we introduce the possibility of the sea-surface slope measurements using second-order statistics of return waveforms from sea surface in a continuous-wave radar scatterometer. It has been shown that the estimation of the variance of sea-surface slopes can be obtained by measuring the signal power or the power-spectrum width of return waveforms. We found that the power-spectrum-width-based estimation approach is more sensitive to the variance of the sea-surface slope for weak sea-surface disturbances in contrast to the power-based one.