Wind field reconstruction based on dual-polarized synthetic aperture radar during a tropical cyclone

Abstract

A wind field reconstruction method for dual-polarized (vertical-vertical [VV] and vertical-horizontal [VH]) Sentinel-1 (S-1) synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images collected during tropical cyclones (TCs) that does not require external information is proposed. Forty S-1 images acquired in interferometric-wide (IW) and extra-wide (EW) modes during the Satellite Hurricane Observation Campaign in 2015–2022 were collected. Stepped-frequency microwave radiometer (SFMR) observations made onboard the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s hurricane aircraft are available for 13 images. The geophysical model functions, namely VV-polarized C-SARMOD and cross-polarized S-1 IW/EW mode wind speed retrieval model after noise removal (S1IW.NR/S1EW.NR), were employed to invert the wind fields from the collected images. TC wind fields were reconstructed based on SAR-derived winds, enhancing TC intensity representation in the VV-polarized SAR retrievals and minimizing the error of the VH-polarized SAR retrievals at the sub-swath edge. The wind speeds retrieved from the SAR IW image were validated against the remote-sensing products from the soil moisture active passive (SMAP) radiometer, yielding a root mean squared error (RMSE) of approximately 4.3 m s⁻¹, which is slightly smaller than the RMSE (4.4 m s⁻¹) for the operational CyclObs wind product provided by the French Research Institute for Exploitation of the Sea (IFREMER). However, the CyclObs wind product has better performance than the approach proposed in this paper for the S-1 EW mode. Moreover, the RMSE of the wind speed between SAR-derived wind speed obtained using the proposed approach and the CyclObs wind product is within 3 m s⁻¹ in all flow directions clockwise relative to north centered on the TC’s eye. This study provides an alternative method for TC wind retrieval from dual-polarized S-1 images without suffering saturation problem and external information; however, the pattern of the wind field around the TC’s eye needs to be further improved, especially at the head and back of the TC’s eye.