C波段机载合成孔径雷达海面风场反演新方法

针对基于散射计地球物理模型函数的机载合成孔径雷达(SAR)海面风场反演中存在的风向获取依赖于图像风条纹或数值预报、 散射计数据和浮标等背景场资料, 风向与SAR图像时空分辨率不匹配, 进而影响机载SAR海面风场反演精度等问题, 本文根据机载SAR对海探测特点, 研究一种适用于C波段机载SAR的海面风场反演新方法. 利用SAR图像距离向不同入射角的后向散射系数, 依据地球物理模型构造最小代价函数, 通过代价函数的求解直接从机载SAR数据同时反演出海面风速和风向. 利用论文提出的海面风场反演方法分别对仿真SAR数据和实测C波段机载SAR数据进行风向、 风速的反演误差分析及试验验证.研究结果表明, 该方法适用于机载SAR海面风场反演, 可不依赖背景风向直接反演出精度较高的风速和风向; 雷达后向散射系数误差是决定海面风速、风向反演精度的关键因素, 辐射定标精度越高则反演误差越小; 海面风速反演误差随着风速的提高而增大, 当海面风速大于18 m/s时, 风速反演误差显著增加, 而海面风向的反演误差与风速无明显关系. 关键词： 机载合成孔径雷达 海面风场 多入射角

A new ocean surface wind field retrieval method from C-band airborne synthetic aperture radar

Wind direction retrieval depending on other background sources, e.g., the visible wind-induced streaks, numerical weather prediction model data, scatterometer data and buoy data is the key problem existing in the ocean wind field retrieval using airborne synthetic aperture radar (SAR) data based on geophysical model function which influences the wind speed and direction retrieval accuracies. To solve this problem, a new ocean wind field retrieval method is proposed, with which the wind speed and direction are estimated simultaneously through using the normalized radar cross sections corresponding to different incidence angles and geophysical model function according to the sounding characteristics of airborne SAR. To evaluate the ocean wind field retrieval errors and effects, the simulated data and C band airborne SAR data are used to obtain the wind speed and direction by the proposed method. The verification results show that the wind field retrieval method is suited to retrieve highly accurate wind speed and direction from airborne SAR sounding data without other background sources. The major error can be explained by the insufficient accuracy in calibration of the NRCS for wind speed and wind direction retrieval. The wind speed error increases with the value of speed increasing and at high wind speeds exceeding 18 m/s the error increases distinctly. The value of wind speed has no obvious influence on wind direction retrieval accuracy.