Estimation of Ocean Current Velocity in Coastal Area Using Radarsat-1 SAR Images and HF-Radar Data

This paper presents the results of the surface current velocity estimation using 6 Radarsat-1 SAR images and high frequency (HF) radar data acquired in west coastal area near Incheon, Korea. We extracted the surface velocity from SAR images based on the Doppler shift approach in which the azimuth frequency shift is related to the motion of surface target in the radar direction. The extracted SAR current velocities were statistically compared with the current velocities from the HF-radar data. The corrected SAR current velocity inherits the average of HF-radar while maintaining high-resolution mature of the original SAR data.