Airborne SAR observations of ocean surface waves penetrating floating ice

The results are presented for a new and improved procedure for estimating the synthetic-aperture radar (SAR) image spectrum of ocean waves. This procedure, the spectral-sum method, involves summing individual image spectra derived from each of the looks of a multilook set. An automatic registration of the per-look spectral information is achieved, accounting for subimage look misregistration due to the wave propagation between looks. Spectral-sum processing is compared with traditional look-sum processing as a function of the radar slant-range. Spectral-sum processing is applied to SAR imagery of waves penetrating the marginal ice zone