A Study of Wind Direction Effects on Sea Surface Specular Scattering for GNSS-R Applications

A modeling study investigating the influence of wind direction on spaceborne global navigation satellite system reflectometry (GNSS-R) near-specular observations of the sea surface is reported. The study first focuses on a purely specular geometry under plane wave incidence, for which it is shown using the theorem of reciprocity and reflection symmetry that up-down wind variations are identically zero. It is also shown that “single-scattering” approximations of rough surface scattering predict no variations with wind direction of any kind for a purely specular geometry, while higher order approximations (such as the second-order small-slope approximation) can predict up/cross wind differences. Examples of these variations are reported and found to be small. Because the delay doppler maps (DDMs) measured in GNSS-R include some nonspecular contributions even for “specular” portions of the DDM, the second part of the study performs an examination of near-specular DDM variations with wind direction using the widely used geometrical optics approximation of surface scattering for a surface described with the non-Gaussian Cox-Munk slope probability density function. Variations with wind direction of the normalized radar cross section (NRCS) mapped onto the surface are examined, and again, it is shown that these variations are small for surface portions contributing to the near-specular portion of the DDM. In addition, it is shown that the dependencies of the bistatic NRCS on wind direction are such that differing portions of the surface “glistening zone” have differing phase shifts in their dependence on wind direction, causing the wind dependencies of the final near-specular DDM to be negligible. The final results of the study suggest that any wind direction dependence in spaceborne GNSS-R should be sought only in portions of the DDM away from the specular region. These results provide information to guide analyses of the wind direction information available in current GNSS-R missions such as TDS-1 and Cyclone Global Navigation Satellite System.