A Three-Dimensional Formulation for Synthetic Aperture Radar Images of Ocean Waves in Orbital Motions

An analytic model of the ocean surface SAR images with a three-dimensional framework is developed following the formalism presented by Swift and Wilson (1979); a trochoidal swell propagates through a uniform field of Bragg-type distributed scatterers. Two- dimensional SAR images are calculated for the interpretation and prediction of actual SAR images of the ocean surface as a function of ocean wave amplitude, wave frequency, propagation direction, and radar frequency, off-nadir angle of the antenna, and spatial resolutions.