Modelling Wind and Wave Remote Sensing Data

Wind and wave satellite data are now an important tool towards the analysis of sea climate, and their importance is ever increasing as more and more earth observation satellites are launched; since the accuracy of the calibration procedures is of paramount importance, a great amount of work was carried out in the 70s and the 80s to develop reliable algorithms. Thanks to the more recent research progresses in the understanding of the sea spectral characteristics, and to the greater availability of wave buoy measurements, there is ample scope to improve the quality of data retrieval, and specially so of the wind data. Numerical simulation of the altimeter response, performed by the Authors through a spectral model of the sea surface coupled with a parametric conceptual model of the Bragg scattering effect, may lead to some important advances. Numerical results — which will be shown in the paper, highlight a certain dependence of the radar altimeter response signal energy (which is usually taken as an index of the backscattering coefficient and therefore of the wind intensity) from the sea peak period; such a dependence may result in a bias which affects mainly the measurements taken in enclosed or semi-enclosed seas. The objective of the research is to evaluate if the effect of sea state over the signal intensity as shown by the numerical tests is confirmed by the analysis of measured data.