Testing the diagnosis of marine atmospheric boundary-layer structure from synthetic aperture radar

Abstract : My long-term goal is to continue to test and refine a similarity-based method for the extraction of marine atmospheric boundary layer (MABL) fluxes from synthetic aperture radar (SAR) wind imagery of the sea surface. Thus far, I have implemented this method on seventeen SAR wind images from off the east coast of the United States using bulk-derived statistics from coincident buoy data as ground truth. Agreement is encouraging. The rate of acquisition of SAR wind imagery available to me has increased. Imagery is available over the Gulf of Alaska as well as off the east coast of the United States, in conjunction with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)-sponsored Storm Watch / Alaska SAR Demonstration (http://fermi.jhuapl.edu/sar/stormwatch/index.html). Therefore, the potential for robust testing of the method will continue. Questions I wish to address include the influence of the surface wave state, the synoptic and mesoscale meteorological environment, pixel size, and the averaging window size of the SAR wind imagery on the performance of the method.