Comparative study of ocean wave spectrum using ENVISAT SAR data and wave rider buoy data

Abstract

A comparative study of ENVISAT ASAR data and corresponding wave rider buoy data has been attempted. An algorithm has been developed to retrieve Ocean Wave Spectrum from SAR data. The resulting spectrum is compared with the wave rider buoy measured wave spectrum. To compute the 2-D image spectrum from multi-look SAR data, various corrections to the original SAR data has been applied. Thereafter, Modulation Transfer Function has been computed and utilized to convert image spectrum to the Ocean Wave Spectrum. This final ocean wave height spectrum is used to estimate the ocean wave spectral parameters and has been compared with the in-situ measurements and model derived wave spectrum. An attempt has also been made to process the Single Look Complex (SLC) data to reduce the speckle noise in the SAR data using Fast Fourier Transform (FFT).