MARINE MONITORING OF THE SOUTH- AND EAST CHINA SEAS BASED ON ENVISAT ASAR

摘要

Monitoring of the South- and East China Seas has been carried out for the period January to September 2005 with Envisat ASAR as the primary source of data. More than 130 Wide Swath scenes have been collected, showing a wide spectrum of oceanic features, such as current fronts, internal waves and wind generated surface waves, as well as rain cells, oil slicks, natural films and ships. Two software tools are here used to analyse the ASAR scenes: SARTool is a software developed for the analysis of SAR data for marine applications, and can be used to get quantitative estimates of wind and waves and to detect oil slicks and ships. The other tool used is the Radar Imaging Model (RIM), which couples a hydrodynamical model and a radar transfer model to calculate the radar backscatter that a SAR would measure for given wind speed and direction, surface current, surface film and, boundary layer stability, and radar geometry and wavelength. This paper shows some examples of applications of these two models to a selection of interesting ASAR scenes.