Development of an Operational Sar System for Geophysical Measurements: Wind Fields as a First Case

Over the past decade, the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (JHU/APL) with the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has been converting synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imagery from virtually all modern spaceborne SAR systems into high-resolution wind speed imagery. The APL/NOAA SAR Wind Retrieval System (ANSWRS) is an outgrowth of the Alaska SAR Demonstration Project [1]. It has demonstrated wind retrievals from the Radarsat-1 SAR and other sensors in near real time, with resolutions better than 1 km and wind speed accuracy better than 2.0 m/s when compared to buoys and QuikSCAT measurements [2, 3]. Based on this ongoing success, NOAA has decided to implement ANSWRS in a fully-operational context. This affords us the opportunity to re-form ANSWRS into a system that is not only more reliable and easier to maintain, but a system that can be extended to other geophysical SAR measurements, from ocean wave spectra, to oil spill monitoring, to ship detection, by the addition of new modules. This paper describes the approach we take and progress achieved thus far.