Capabilities of Chinese Gaofen-3 Synthetic Aperture Radar in Selected Topics for Coastal and Ocean Observations

Remote Sensing

Bingqing Huang¹  Tianyu Zhang¹  Tong Jia¹  Xiao-Ming Li¹ 

[1] Key Laboratory of Digital Earth Science, Institute of Remote Sensing and Digital Earth, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100094, China;

关键词: synthetic aperture radar;    GF-3;    coast and ocean observation;    sea surface roughness;   

DOI  :  10.3390/rs10121929

来源: DOAJ

【 摘 要 】

Gaofen-3 (GF-3), the first Chinese spaceborne synthetic aperture radar (SAR) in C-band for civil applications, was launched on August 2016. Some studies have examined the use of GF-3 SAR data for ocean and coastal observations, but these studies generally focus on one particular application. As GF-3 has been in operation over two years, it is essential to evaluate its performance in ocean observation, a primary goal of the GF-3 launch. In this paper, we offer an overview demonstrating the capabilities of GF-3 SAR in ocean and coastal observations by presenting several representative cases, i.e., the monitoring of intertidal flats, offshore tidal turbulent wakes and oceanic internal waves, to highlight the GF-3’s full polarimetry, high spatial resolution and wide-swath imaging advantages. Moreover, we also present a detailed analysis of the use of GF-3 quad-polarization data for sea surface wind retrievals and wave mode data for sea surface wave retrievals. The case studies and statistical analysis suggest that GF-3 has good ocean and coastal monitoring capabilities, though further improvements are possible, particularly in radiometric calibration and stable image quality.

【 授权许可】

Unknown