Validation of wind retrievals from the RADARSAT SAR

As part of the Alaska SAR Demonstration Project, the authors have been automatically processing, RADARSAT synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imagery into high-resolution estimates of wind speed. This processing fuses RADARSAT radar cross section estimates as produced by the Alaska SAR Facility (ASF) with wind directions from the Navy Operational Global Atmospheric Prediction (NOGAPS) model run by the Fleet Numerical Meteorology and Oceanography Center (FNMOC) to produce wind speed maps at better than 1-km resolution. This processing takes place at mirror sites at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory and at NOAA/NESDIS. The time from acquisition at the satellite, through image correlation at ASF, through transmission to NOAA and to the appearance of wind speed images on the web is typically about 5 hours. The authors describe this processing and compare SAR-derived and model-wind speed estimates to isolate and characterize any systematic differences between the two