Abstract
Chinese Gaofen-3 (GF-3) is the first civilian satellite to carry C-band (5.3 GHz) synthetic aperture radar (SAR). During the period of August 2016 to December 2017, 1 523 GF-3 SAR images acquired in quad-polarization (vertical-vertical (VV), horizontal-horizontal (HH), vertical-horizontal (VH), and horizontal-vertical (HV)) mode were recorded, mostly around China’s seas. In our previous study, the root mean square error (RMSE) of significant wave height (SWH) was found to be around 0.58 m when compared with retrieval results from a few GF-3 SAR images in co-polarization (VV and HH) with moored measurements by using an empirical algorithm CSAR_WAVE. We collected a number of sub-scenes from these 1 523 images in the co-polarization channel, which were collocated with wind and SWH data from the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) reanalysis field at a 0.125° grid. Through the collected dataset, an improved empirical wave retrieval algorithm for GF-3 SAR in co-polarization was tuned, herein denoted as CSAR_WAVE2. An additional 92 GF-3 SAR images were implemented in order to validate CSAR_WAVE2 against SWH from altimeter Jason-2, showing an about 0.52 m RMSE of SWH for co-polarization GF-3 SAR. Therefore, we conclude that the proposed empirical algorithm has a good performance for wave retrieval from GF-3 SAR images in co-polarization.
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Acknowledgements
Gaofen-3 synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images are collected through an authorized account issued by the National Ocean Satellite Application Center (NSOAS) under the contract of Specific Project of Chinese High Resolution Earth Observation System (No. 41-Y20A14-9001-15/16) via http://dds.nsoas.org.cn. The authers greatly appreciate the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) for providing reanalysis wind and wave data at a 0.125 grid, which were openly downloaded via http://www.ecmwf.int. Operational Geophysical Data Record (OGDR) wave data from Jason-2 mission were accessed via https://data.nodc.noaa.gov. The authers thank Cui Limin (NSOAS) and Li Huan (National Marine Data and Information Service) for the helpful discussions.
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Foundation item: The National Key Research and Development Program of China under contract Nos 2016YFC1401905 and 2017YFA0604901; the National Natural Science Foundation of China under contract Nos 41776183, 41676014, 41606024 and 41506033; the National Social Science Foundation of China under contract No. 15ZDB170.
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Sheng, Y., Shao, W., Zhu, S. et al. Validation of significant wave height retrieval from co-polarization Chinese Gaofen-3 SAR imagery using an improved algorithm. Acta Oceanol. Sin. 37, 1–10 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13131-018-1217-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13131-018-1217-1