ON THE PERFORMANCE OF THE MPI ALGORITHM FOR THE RETRIEVAL OF SIGNIFICANT WAVE HEIGHT FROM ERS SYNTHETIC APERTURE RADAR

摘要

Spaceborne Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) is to date the only source of two dimensional directional wave spectra with continuous and global coverage when operated in the so-called SAR Wave Mode (SWM). Since the launch in 1991 of the first European Remote Sensing Satellite ERS-1 and more recently with ENVISAT millions of SWM imageries containing detailed spectral information are now available in quasi-real time. This huge amount of directional wave data has opened up many exciting possibilities for the improvement of our knowledge of the dynamics of ocean waves. However the retrieval of wave spectra from SAR images is not a trivial exercise due to the nonlinear-ities involved in the mapping mechanism. The Max-Planck In-stitut (MPI) scheme was the first ever proposed and most widely used algorithm to retrieve directional wave spectra from SAR images. In this work significant wave height retrieved from SAR images using the MPI scheme are compared against one year of directional buoy measurements obtained in deep water and against WAM spectra. Our results show that for periods shorter than 12 seconds the WAM model performs better than the MPI method, even considering the fact that the model is used as first guess to the MPI scheme. However, for periods longer than 12 seconds (the part of the spectrum directly observed by SAR) the MPI method performs better than WAM. This is in contrast with the results obtained by Voorrips et al. (2001), who found that the performance of the WAM model is superior even when only the low wavenumber part of the spectrum is considered.