Super Resolution Mapping of Scatterometer Ocean Surface Wind Speed Using Generative Adversarial Network: Experiments in the Southern China Sea

This paper designed a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN)-based super-resolution framework for scatterometer ocean surface wind speed (OSWS) mapping. An improved GAN, WSGAN, was well-trained to generate high-resolution OSWS (~1/64 km) from low-resolution OSWS (~12.5 km) retrieved from scatterometer observations. The generator of GAN incorporated Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) information in the training phase. Therefore, the pre-trained model could reconstruct high-resolution OSWS with historical local spatial and texture information. The training experiments were executed in the South China Sea using the OSWS generated from the Advanced SCATterometer (ASCAT) scatterometer and Sentinel-1 SAR OSWS set. Several GAN-based methods were compared, and WSGAN performed the best in most sea states, enabling more detail mining with fewer checkerboard artifacts at a scale factor of eight. The model reaches an overall root mean square error (RMSE) of 0.81 m/s and an overall mean absolute error (MAE) of 0.68 m/s in the collocation region of ASCAT and Sentinel-1. The model also exhibits excellent generalization capability in another scatterometer with an overall RMSE of 1.11 m/s. This study benefits high-resolution OSWS users when no SAR observation is available