Spaceborne SAR wave mode data as big data for global ocean wave observation

Conference: EUSAR 2021 - 13th European Conference on Synthetic Aperture Radar
03/29/2021 - 04/01/2021 at online

Proceedings: EUSAR 2021

Pages: 6Language: englishTyp: PDF

Authors:
Huang, Bingqing (Key Laboratory of Digital Earth Science, Aerospace Information Research Institute, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China & University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China)
Li, Xiao-Ming (Key Laboratory of Digital Earth Science, Aerospace Information Research Institute, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China)

Abstract:
The Wave Mode (WM) is a unique imaging mode of spaceborne synthetic aperture radar (SAR), which is dedicatedly designed for global ocean surface wave observations. Since it was firstly achieved in the ERS-1/SAR satellite starting from 1991, the WM data over global oceans have been continuously acquired by the ESA’s SAR instruments onboard the satellites of ERS-2 (1997 – 2011), ENVISAT (2002 – 2012), Sentinel-1A(2014–)/1B(2016–) and the Chinese GaoFen-3 SAR (2016–), for nearly 30 years. Therefore, spaceborne SAR WM data have been a ‘big data’, which however, has not been widely exploited for global ocean wave measurements. In this study, we demonstrate its application on global ocean wave measurements based on the ten-year Advanced SAR (ASAR) WM data.