Preliminary Evaluation of Sentinel-1A Wind Speed Retrievals

The accuracy of wind speed retrievals from synthetic aperture radars (SARs) is strongly dependent upon the accuracy of the normalized radar cross section measurement. Here, we make a preliminary assessment of wind speed retrievals from Sentinel-1A. In particular, we use Sentinel-1A SAR imagery to co...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:IEEE journal of selected topics in applied earth observations and remote sensing 2016-06, Vol.9 (6), p.2638-2642
Main Authors: Monaldo, Frank, Jackson, Christopher, Li, Xiaofeng, Pichel, William G.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Accuracy
Advanced scatterometers (ASCAT)
Assessments
Numerical models
Radar cross sections
Radar measurements
Retrieval
Sentinel-1A
Standard deviation
Synthetic aperture radar
synthetic aperture radar (SAR)
US Government agencies
Wind forecasting
Wind speed
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Summary:The accuracy of wind speed retrievals from synthetic aperture radars (SARs) is strongly dependent upon the accuracy of the normalized radar cross section measurement. Here, we make a preliminary assessment of wind speed retrievals from Sentinel-1A. In particular, we use Sentinel-1A SAR imagery to compute wind speed at 500-m resolution. These measurements are averaged to 25 km and compared with advanced scatterometers (ASCAT) wind speed measurements from the METOP-A and METOP-B satellites. Spatially coincident measurements separated by less than 2 h are shown to agree to better than 2 m/s in standard deviation for wind speeds less that 20 m/s. Particularly, good agreement is found for Sentinel-1A VV-polarization measurements, though both HH- and VV-measurements exceed the 2 m/s accuracy standard.
ISSN:1939-1404
2151-1535
DOI:10.1109/JSTARS.2015.2504324