Developing a Subswath-Based Wind Speed Retrieval Model for Sentinel-1 VH-Polarized SAR Data Over the Ocean Surface

This paper evaluates the capability of Sentinel-1 VH-polarized synthetic aperture radar signals, involving 738 scenes in the interferometric wide swath (IW) mode, for ocean surface wind speed retrieval using a novel subswath-based C-band cross-polarized ocean model. When compared with in situ measurements, it is observed that wind speed retrieval accuracy varies progressively along swath, with the most accurate wind speed retrievals being derived from subswath 3 [root-mean-square error (RMSE) of 1.82 m.s(-1)], followed by subswath 2 (RMSE of 1.92 m.s(-1)), while subswath 1 showed the lowest retrieval accuracy (RMSE of 2.37 m.s(-1)). The average RMSE of wind speeds retrieved from all the three subswaths is 2.08 m.s(-1) under low-to-high wind speed regimes (wind speeds < 25 m.s(-1)). We further observed that the dependence of VH-polarized normalized radar cross section (NRCS) on incidence angle is attributable to the high and changing noise equivalent sigma zero (NESZ) with incidence angle under low-to-moderate wind speed regimes. And that strong VH-polarized radar signals could overcome the NESZ effect, thereby eliminating the dependence of VH-polarized NRCS on incidence angle under strong wind conditions. For Sentinel-1 IW mode VH-polarized data, the effect of NESZ could be ignored when wind speeds are greater than 15 m.s(-1), as a better wind speed retrieval performance of these data has been recorded in this paper at wind speeds greater than 10 m.s(-1), owing to an RMSE below 1.6 m.s(-1) and biases ranging from -0.5 to 0.5 m.s(-1).