Testing the Diagnosis of Marine Atmospheric Boundary Layer Structure from Synthetic Aperture Radar

Abstract

My long-term goal is to continue to test and refine a similarity-based method for the extraction of marine atmospheric boundary layer (MABL) fluxes from synthetic aperture radar (SAR) wind imagery of the sea surface. Thus far, I have implemented this method on seventeen SAR wind images from off the east coast of the United States using bulk-derived statistics from coincident buoy data as ground truth. Agreement is encouraging. The rate of acquisition of SAR wind imagery available to me has increased. Imagery is available over the Gulf of Alaska as well as off the east coast of the United States, in conjunction with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)-sponsored Storm Watch / Alaska SAR Demonstration (http://fermi.jhuapl.edu/sar/stormwatch/index.html). Therefore, the potential for robust testing of the method will continue. Questions I wish to address include the influence of the surface wave state, the synoptic and mesoscale meteorological environment, pixel size, and the averaging window size of the SAR wind imagery on the performance of the method.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Sep 30, 2000
Accession Number
ADA610085

Entities

People

  • Todd D. Sikora

Organizations

  • United States Naval Academy

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Space

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Boundaries
  • Boundary Layer
  • Data Sets
  • Earth Sciences
  • Environment
  • High Resolution
  • Layers
  • Physics Laboratories
  • Radar
  • Scattering
  • Statistics
  • Surface Roughness
  • Surface Waves
  • Synthetic Aperture Radar
  • United States
  • United States Naval Academy
  • Waves

Fields of Study

  • Environmental science

Readers

  • Image Processing and Computer Vision.
  • Maritime Security/Maritime Homeland Security
  • Ocean-Atmosphere Mesoscale Modeling, Data Assimilation, and Flux Boundary Layers