On the relationship between sea surface SAR speckle and wind field

In this study, synthetic aperture radar ocean speckle is exploited to infer information on sea surface wind field. The K-distribution is adopted to model the single look complex vertically/vertically-polarized intensity speckle signal measured over sea surface under different wind conditions, i. e., wind speed and direction. Experiments undertaken on a large set of Sentinel-1 SAR data collected over the northeastern part of the Atlantic ocean, between southern Iceland and northern Scotland, showed that the shape parameter of the K-distribution is sensitive to both ocean wind field and SAR imaging parameters. In particular, it was shown that the shape parameter decreases when increasing wind speed while its variability becomes significant under crosswind relative azimuth angle and at larger incidence angles.