CIRFA seminar 15 June: Sea surface currents retrieval using along-track interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar

Date: Thursday 15 June, 13h00-14h00
Venue: CIRFA, Forskningsparken 3, 3rd floor, Tromsø
Presented by: Anis Elyouncha, PhD Student, Earth and Space Sciences, Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden

Abstract:

Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) has proven to be a very powerful tool for ocean remote sensing. The ability to measure sea surface currents using Along-Track Interferometry technique with SAR (ATI-SAR) has also been demonstrated by different studies. The interferometric phase provided by ATI-SAR technique is directly related to the radial velocity of the ocean surface. In practice, however, the complexity of the sea surface dynamics and imperfections in the SAR system and processor makes ocean currents retrieval a very challenging problem. The most difficult issues in sea surface currents retrieval using ATI-SAR are the phase calibration and the removal of the ocean waves’ contribution to the phase. Another problem that hinders the maturation of the technique, towards operational use, is the lack of validation data, either due to the sparsity of in-situ data and/or to the coarse resolution of the ocean circulation models.  This talk gives an overview of the ATI-SAR technique and sea surface currents retrieval. The challenges mentioned above and the attempted solutions are discussed. Finally, examples using the X-band ATI-SAR (TanDEM-X) data are shown to illustrate preliminary results.