Microwave Satellite Measurements for Coastal Area and Extreme Weather Monitoring

In this project report, the main outcomes relevant to the Sino-European Dragon-4 cooperation project ID 32235 “Microwave satellite measurements for coastal area and extreme weather monitoring” are reported. The project aimed at strengthening the Sino-European research cooperation in the exploitation of European Space Agency, Chinese and third-party mission Earth Observation (EO) microwave satellite data. The latter were exploited to perform an effective monitoring of coastal areas, even under extreme weather conditions. An integrated multifrequency/polarization approach based on complementary microwave sensors (e.g., Synthetic Aperture Radar, scatterometer, radiometer), together with ancillary information coming from independent sources, i.e., optical imagery, numerical simulations and ground measurements, was designed. In this framework, several tasks were addressed including marine target detection, sea pollution, sea surface wind estimation and coastline extraction/classification. The main outcomes are both theoretical (i.e., new models and algorithms were developed) and applicative (i.e., user-friendly maps were provided to the end-user community of coastal area management according to smart processing of remotely sensed data). The scientific relevance consists in the development of new algorithms, the effectiveness and robustness of which were verified on actual microwave measurements, and the improvement of existing methodologies to deal with challenging test cases

Ocean Remote Sensing with Synthetic Aperture Radar

The ocean covers approximately 71% of the Earth’s surface, 90% of the biosphere and contains 97% of Earth’s water. The Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) can image the ocean surface in all weather conditions and day or night. SAR remote sensing on ocean and coastal monitoring has become a research hotspot in geoscience and remote sensing. This book—Progress in SAR Oceanography—provides an update of the current state of the science on ocean remote sensing with SAR. Overall, the book presents a variety of marine applications, such as, oceanic surface and internal waves, wind, bathymetry, oil spill, coastline and intertidal zone classification, ship and other man-made objects’ detection, as well as remotely sensed data assimilation. The book is aimed at a wide audience, ranging from graduate students, university teachers and working scientists to policy makers and managers. Efforts have been made to highlight general principles as well as the state-of-the-art technologies in the field of SAR Oceanography

High-resolution mapping of Bora winds in the northern Adriatic Sea using synthetic aperture radar

Author Posting. © American Geophysical Union, 2010. This article is posted here by permission of American Geophysical Union for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Journal of Geophysical Research 115 (2010): C04020, doi:10.1029/2009JC005524.The Adriatic Sea is regularly subjected to strong Bora wind events from the northeast during winter. The events have a strong effect on the oceanography in the Adriatic, driving basin-scale gyres that determine the transport of biogeochemical material and extracting large amounts of heat. The Bora is known to have multiple surface wind jets linked to the surrounding orography and have been the focus of many studies, but it has not been possible to describe the detailed spatial structure of these jets by in situ observations. Using high-resolution spaceborne RADARSAT-1 synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images collected during an active Bora period (23 January–16 February 2003), we created a series of high-resolution (300 m) maps of the wind field. The obtained winds show reasonable agreement with several in situ wind observations, with an RMS wind speed error of 3.6 m/s, slightly higher than the 2–3 m/s errors reported in previous studies. These SAR images reveal the spatial structure of the Bora wind in unprecedented detail, showing several new features. In the Senj region of Croatia, several images show rhythmic structure with wavelengths of 2–3 km that may reflect Bora pulsation seen at fixed locations by previous investigators. Along the Italian coast, several images show a wide (20–30 km) band of northwesterly winds that abruptly change to the northeasterly Bora winds further offshore. Meteorological model results suggest that these northwesterly winds are consistent with those of a barrier jet forming along the Italian Apennine mountain chain

MULTI-SATELLITE OBSERVATION OF MEGH CYCLONE

Cyclone Megh, a category-3 (Saffir-Simpson scale) cyclonic storm is regarded as the worst tropical cyclone to ever strike Yemen’s island of Socotra. In this paper, we aim to investigate the wind structure of cyclone Megh using Synthetic Aperture Radar (RISAT-1 SAR) observations. An algorithm for the cyclone wind retrieval has been applied for SAR data of Nov 8, 2015 at 0238:09 UTC in the Arabian Sea. The intensity of cyclone is 30 m/s with the 16.65 km radius of maximum wind speed from the centre of the cyclone. The high resolution SAR data analysis bring to focus the possible presence of eyewall mesovortex in case of Megh. Recent work has shown that vorticity mixing in the tropical cyclone (TC) inner core can promote mesovortex (MV) formation and impact storm intensity. This has further been corroborated using INSAT-3D and MODIS optical band observations of clouds. Analysis of these satellite derived cloud microphysical properties shows the presence of larger hydrometeors surrounding the eye due to possible embedding of stratus and stratocumulus cloud decks. Thus, this kind of study helps in understanding the microphysical processes within a TC as well estimating their impacts on cyclone intensity and lifetime

Design Options For Low Cost, Low Power Microsatellite Based SAR.

This research aims at providing a system design that reduces the mass and cost of spaceborne Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) missions by a factor of two compared to current (TecSAR - 300 kg, ~ £ 127 M) or planned (NovaSAR-S — 400 kg, ~ £ 50 M) mission. This would enable the cost of a SAR constellation to approach that of the current optical constellation such as Disaster Monitoring Constellation (DMC). This research has identified that the mission cost can be reduced significantly by: focusing on a narrow range of applications (forestry and disasters monitoring); ensuring the final design has a compact stowage volume, which facilitates a shared launch; and building the payload around available platforms, rather than the platform around the payload. The central idea of the research has been to operate the SAR at a low instantaneous power level—a practical proposition for a micro-satellite based SAR. The use of a simple parabolic reflector with a single horn at L-band means that a single, reliable and efficient Solid State Power Amplifier (SSPA) can be used to lower the overall system cost, and to minimise the impact on the spacecraft power system. A detailed analysis of basic pulsed (~ 5 - 10 % duty cycle) and Continuous Wave (CW) SAR (100 % duty cycle) payloads has shown their inability to fit directly into existing microsatellite buses without involving major changes, or employing more than one platform. To circumvent the problems of pulsed and CW techniques, two approaches have been formulated. The first shows that a CW SAR can be implemented in a mono-static way with a single antenna on a single platform. In this technique, the SAR works in an Interrupted CW (ICW) mode, but these interruptions introduce periodic gaps in the raw data. On processing, these gapped data result in artefacts in the reconstructed images. By applying data based statistical estimation techniques to “fill in the gaps” in the simulated raw SAR data, this research has shown the possibility of minimising the effects of these artefacts. However, once the same techniques are applied to the real SAR data (in this case derived from RADARSAT-1), the artefacts are shown to be problematic. Because of this the ICW SAR design technique it is—set aside. The second shows that an extended chirp mode pulsed (ECMP) SAR (~ 20 - 54 % duty cycle) can be designed with a lowered peak power level which enables a single SSPA to feed a parabolic Cassegrain antenna. The detailed analysis shows the feasibility of developing a microsatellite based SAR design at a comparable price to those of optical missions

한반도 주변해 연안 해양현상에 대한 합성개구레이더 활용

학위논문 (박사)-- 서울대학교 대학원 : 과학교육과 (지구과학전공), 2016. 8. 박경애.In this thesis, the applicability of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) to interpretation of oceanic phenomena at the coastal regions around Korea peninsula is presented. For that, the spatial and temporal variations of SAR-derived coastal wind fields and evolution of disastrous oil spills on SAR images were analyzed in relation to atmospheric and oceanic environmental factors using in-situ measurement and satellite observations. The SAR wind fields retrieved from the east coast of Korea in August 2007 during the upwelling period revealed a spatial distinction between near and offshore regions. Low wind speeds were associated with cold water regions with dominant coastal upwelling. Time series of in-situ measurements of both wind speed and water temperature indicated that the upwelling was induced by the wind field. SAR data at the present upwelling region showed a relatively large backscattering attenuation to SST ratio of 1.2 dB ºC−1 compared the known dependence of the water viscosity on the radar backscattering. In addition, wind speed magnitude showed a positive correlation with the difference between SST and air temperature. It implies that the low wind field from SAR was mainly induced by changes in atmospheric stability due to air-sea temperature differences. Oil spills at the Hebei Spirit accident off the coast of Korea in the Yellow Sea were identified using SAR data and their evolution was investigated. To quantitatively analyze the spatial and temporal variations of oil spills, objective detection methods based on adaptive thresholding and a neural network were applied. Prior to applying, the results from two methods were compared for verification. It showed good agreement enough for the estimation of the extent of oil patches and their trajectories, with the exception of negligible errors at the boundaries. Quantitative analyses presented that the detected oil slicks moved southeastward, corresponding to the prevailing wind and tidal currents, and gradually dissipated during the spill, except for an extraordinary rapid decrease in onshore regions at the initial stage. It was identified that the initial dissipation of the spilt oil was induced by strong tidal mixing in the tidal front zone from comparison with the tidal mixing index. The spatial and temporal variations of the oil slicks confirmed the influence of atmospheric and oceanic environmental factors. The overall horizontal migration of the oil spills detected from consecutive SAR images was mainly driven by Ekman drift during the winter monsoon rather than the tidal residual current.Chapter 1. Introduction 1 1.1. Study Background 1 1.2. Objectives of the Thesis 14 Chapter 2. Data Description 15 2.1. SAR Data 15 2.2. Other Satellite Data 21 2.2.1. Wind Data 21 2.2.2. Sea Surface Temperature Data 21 2.2.3. Ocean Color Data 22 2.3. Reanalysis Data 23 2.4. In-situ Measurements 23 2.5. Land Masking Data 26 2.6. Tidal Current Data 28 Chapter 3. Methods 29 3.1. SAR Wind Retrieval 29 3.2. Noise Reduction of ScanSAR Images 37 3.3. Conversion of Wind Speed to Neutral Wind 41 3.4. Estimation of Index of the Tidal Front 43 3.5. Estimation of Ekman Drift and Tidal Residual Current 45 3.6. Feature Detection Methods 46 3.6.1. Adaptive Threshold Method 47 3.6.2. Bimodal Histogram Method 50 3.6.3. Neural Network Method 54 Chapter 4. Coastal Wind Fields and Upwelling Response 58 4.1. Variations of Wind Fields during Coastal Upwelling 58 4.2. Stability Effect on Wind Speed 65 4.3. Biological Impact of Upwelling 70 Chapter 5. Characteristics of Objective Feature Detection 74 5.1. Comparison of Thresholding Methods 74 5.2. Oil Spill of the Hebei Spirit by Thresholding Method 81 5.3. Oil Spill by the Hebei Spirit by Neural Network Method 85 5.4. Differences by Detection Methods 88 Chapter 6. Evolution of Oil Spill at the Coastal Region 90 6.1. Temporal Evolution of the Hebei Spirit Oil Spill 90 6.2. Effect of Artificial Factor on the Evolution 96 Chapter 7. Effect of Environmental Factors on the Oil Spill 98 7.1. Effect of Tidal Mixing 98 7.2. Effect of Wind and Tidal Current 103 Chapter 8. Summary and Conclusion 110 Reference 114 Abstract in Korean 142Docto

Spaceborne L-Band Synthetic Aperture Radar Data for Geoscientific Analyses in Coastal Land Applications: A Review

The coastal zone offers among the world’s most productive and valuable ecosystems and is experiencing increasing pressure from anthropogenic impacts: human settlements, agriculture, aquaculture, trade, industrial activities, oil and gas exploitation and tourism. Earth observation has great capability to deliver valuable data at the local, regional and global scales and can support the assessment and monitoring of land‐ and water‐related applications in coastal zones. Compared to optical satellites, cloud‐cover does not limit the timeliness of data acquisition with spaceborne Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) sensors, which have all‐weather, day and night capabilities. Hence, active radar systems demonstrate great potential for continuous mapping and monitoring of coastal regions, particularly in cloud‐prone tropical and sub‐tropical climates. The canopy penetration capability with long radar wavelength enables L‐band SAR data to be used for coastal terrestrial environments and has been widely applied and investigated for the following geoscientific topics: mapping and monitoring of flooded vegetation and inundated areas; the retrieval of aboveground biomass; and the estimation of soil moisture. Human activities, global population growth, urban sprawl and climate change‐induced impacts are leading to increased pressure on coastal ecosystems causing land degradation, deforestation and land use change. This review presents a comprehensive overview of existing research articles that apply spaceborne L‐band SAR data for geoscientific analyses that are relevant for coastal land applications

A Marine Radar Wind Sensor

A new method for retrieving the wind vector from radar-image sequences is presented. This method, called WiRAR, uses a marine X-band radar to analyze the backscatter of the ocean surface in space and time with respect to surface winds. Wind direction is found using wind-induced streaks, which are very well aligned with the mean surface wind direction and have a typical spacing above 50 m. Wind speeds are derived using a neural network by parameterizing the relationship between the wind vector and the normalized radar cross section (NRCS). To improve performance, it is also considered how the NRCS depends on sea state and atmospheric parameters such as air–sea temperature and humidity. Since the signal-to-noise ratio in the radar sequences is directly related to the significant wave height, this ratio is used to obtain sea state parameters. All radar datasets were acquired in the German Bight of the North Sea from the research platform FINO-I, which provides environmental data such as wind measurements at different heights, sea state, air–sea temperatures, humidity, and other meteorological and oceanographic parameters. The radar-image sequences were recorded by a marine X-band radar installed aboard FINO-I, which operates at grazing incidence and horizontal polarization in transmit and receive. For validation WiRAR is applied to the radar data and compared to the in situ wind measurements from FINO-I. The comparison of wind directions resulted in a correlation coefficient of 0.99 with a standard deviation of 12.8°, and that of wind speeds resulted in a correlation coefficient of 0.99 with a standard deviation of 0.41 m s^−1. In contrast to traditional offshore wind sensors, the retrieval of the wind vector from the NRCS of the ocean surface makes the system independent of the sensors’ motion and installation height as well as the effects due to platform-induced turbulence