Technical Report No. 2014-1 : Measuring Ocean Winds from Space Using a Radar Satellite (AU-CAS-MathStats)

The goal of this project is to develop and validate image processing algorithms for measuring wind direction over the ocean. We plan to use wind truth data from (1) oceanographic buoys and other anchored sensors and (2) wind measurements from other satellite sensors to validate our SAR-derived wind direction estimates. Both of these sources of truth data are of necessarily lower resolution than what is available from TerraSAR-X. It is worth noting that buoy validation is already routinely done against the ASCAT sensor [14]. Our collection campaign centers on several buoys described in the NOAA’s database [20]. We are using the resulting concurrent data stream for validation of spectral shape, but have not completely validated the recovery of wind direction from the image.