Progress on remotely sensing air-sea fluxes using synthetic aperture radar

Synthetic aperture radar such as the Canadian Space Agency´s C-band HW pol RADARSAT, is sensitive to centimeter-scale sea surface roughness. SAR has the potential to be employed as a tool to help study the MABL because of its proven ability to image the sea surface footprints of many MABL processes. For example, a typical field of cellular convection will result in a mottled appearance on SAR imagery while roll convection will result in linear patterns on SAR imagery. 10-m neutral wind imagery can be generated from HH pol C-band RADARSAT SAR imagery. A logical next step is to use wind imagery to quantitatively study MABL processes such as convection. The present research attempts to employ wind imagery for just such a purpose. The present work extends that on Monin-Obukhov and mixed-layer similarity theory that uses the variance of wind imagery in the presence of statically unstable MABLs to generate diabatic wind imagery. Several MABL statistics including the Obukhov length and the buoyancy flux are calculated