RADARSAT application in ocean wind measurements

SAR can penetrate clouds and precipitation and can provide accurate observations of surface features such as fronts and localized coastal marine winds. Often atmosphere-ocean interaction processes evident in SAR imagery are not present from in situ observations, the operational network, weather prediction models, or scatterometer data, especially in complex coastal areas. Timely, high-resolution SAR-derived wind data have a great potential to improve operational marine weather forecasts, particularly in coastal areas. As an outcome of NSWP the marine meteorologists and other users have an interrupted access to high resolution color-coded maps of SAR-derived wind speeds, ocean buoy observations, and surface wind predictions from NWP models. Over the last 18 months, they had access to over 13,000 such images across all Canadian coastal zones. The two-year Canadian National SAR Winds Project (2009–2011) has successfully demonstrated that quasi-operational SAR Wind retrieval system could be an important element of the operational weather analysis and prediction structure.