Ocean wave spectrum reconstruction from ERS-1 satellite scatterometer data

Satellite scatterometer has been used to measure ocean surface wind speed. Now, the authors suggest that the directional ocean wave spectrum can also be measured by satellite scatterometer for the first time. They define the optimal fit wave spectrum as the spectrum which minimize the cost function including observation and calculation of normalized radar cross-section. The two-scale ocean wave model is used in calculating the NRCS /spl sigma//sup 0/. The solution of the general nonlinear problem was obtained by an iterative technique. Tentative results are shown.