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. I have implemented this method on a limited number of 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 is scheduled to increase. Imagery will be 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 program. Therefore, the potential for robust testing of the method will exist. 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, 1999
Accession Number
ADA630865

Entities

People

  • Todd D. Sikora

Organizations

  • United States Naval Academy

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Space

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

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

Fields of Study

  • Environmental science

Readers

  • Maritime Security/Maritime Homeland Security
  • Ocean-Atmosphere Mesoscale Modeling, Data Assimilation, and Flux Boundary Layers
  • Radar Systems Engineering.