Monitoring Hurricanes Over the Ocean with Wide Swath SAR

ne of the most unexpected new applications for wide swath synthetic aperture radar (SAR) is the monitoring of atmospheric expressions of storms over the ocean. SAR has an advantage over many sensors because it can pass through clouds and take images at any time of day. However, since SAR’s detection capability is based on the modulation of the sea surface wind field, it can only observe storms over water. Hurricanes and other mesoscale storms are easily detected with existing observations, but SAR can contribute fine-resolution low-level information that cannot be seen below the cloud deck with other sensors. Using Radarsat-1, we have imaged three hurricanes during the 1998 season. Two SAR images of Hurricane Bonnie separated by 1 day are presented, and observations from the SAR data are discussed. (