Direct Ocean Surface Velocity Measurement for Chinese Gaofen-3 SAR Satellite

Abstract

Spaceborne Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) is one important way to obtain the information of ocean surface velocity. The Doppler Centroid Anomaly (DCA) estimation, which obtain the radical velocity based on the difference between the measured Doppler centroid and the predicted Doppler centroid, have be used to most onboard spaceborne SAR. GaoFen-3 (GF-3), the first full-polarimetric SAR satellite of China. This paper shows the experiments of direct ocean surface velocity measurement for GF-3 SAR Satellite. Comparing the results to the actual ocean current, the proposed method of ocean surface velocity measurement for GF-3 SAR is validated. Thus, GF-3 has the similar ability to retrieve the radical ocean surface velocity as Sentinel-1 and Radarsat-2.