WIND FIELDS FROM COSMO-SKYMED AND RADARSAT-2 SAR IN COASTAL AREAS

This paper is aimed to outline the possible uses of SAR derived wind fields in coastal meteorology, taking advantage of two running projects: the first of meteorological flavor, aimed to measure and reproduce the surface wind field in a small coastal area; the second to investigate the possibilities offered by the combined use of simultaneous COSMO-SkyMed and RADARSAT-2 SAR images in the description of the wind field in the same area. The main issues faced in this study and partially solved are: the development of a suitable methodology to extract the wind field from SAR images at different bands, polarization, incidence angle; the understanding of the potentialities of the SAR derived winds to catch the patterns of the spatial variability of the wind over the coastal area; the assessment of the SAR derived wind from comparisons with the simultaneous experimental data. Of course, the results presented here are not exhaustive, but only aim to track the ongoing research on the topic of wind over local coastal areas.