Estimation of Polarization Ratio for Sea Surface Wind Retrieval from SIR-C SAR Data

Wind speeds have long been estimated from C-band VV-polarized SAR data by using the CMOD algorithms such as CMOD4, CMOD5, and CMOD_IFR2. Some SAR data with HH-polarization without any observations in VV-polarization mode should be converted to VV-polarized value in order to use the previous algorithms based on VV-polarized observation. To satisfy the necessity of polarization ratio (PR) for the conversion, we retrieved the conversion parameter from full-polarized SIR-C SAR image off the east coast of Korea. The polarization ratio for SIR-C SAR data was estimated to 0.47. To assess the accuracy of the polarization ratio coefficient, pseudo VV-polarized normalized radar cross section (NRCS) values were calculated and compared with the original VV-polarized ones. As a result, the estimated psudo values showed a good agreement with the original VV-polarized data with an root mean square error by 0.99 dB. We applied the psudo NRCS to the estimation of wind speeds based on the CMOD wind models. Comparison of the retrieved wind field with the ECMWF and NCEP/NCAR reanalysis wind data showed relatively small rms errors of 1.88 and 1.91 m/s, respectively. SIR-C HH-polarized SAR wind retrievals met the requirement of the scatterometer winds in overall. However, the polarization ratio coefficient revealed dependence on NRCS value, wind speed, and incident angle.