High-Resolution Wind Field Mapping in Support of the ONR Coupled Boundary Layer Air-Sea Transfer (CBLAST) Program

The long-term goal of this research effort is to investigate the possibility of obtaining quantitative information about the near-surface wind field and perhaps other parameters that characterize the Marine Atmospheric Boundary Layer (MABL) from an analysis of Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) imagery. Because of its potential for yielding such information in the form of high-resolution imagery, this application of SAR, especially in coastal waters, would represent a significant advance over most scatterometer and passive microwave sensors that yield only coarse-resolution estimates of the wind field.