Reducing the antenna beam pattern impact on Sentinel-1 wind fields

Abstract

A close inspection of the Sentinel-1 (S-1) Interferometric Wide Swath (IW) mode data over the ocean reveals antenna beam patterns remaining in the calibrated and noise-corrected data, resulting in discontinuous wind speed values across the beam boundaries. We present an analysis of the impact of this effect on estimated wind fields based on more than 8000 Sentinel acquisitions with level-2 OCN data available and compare to high resolution ECMWF model data. We propose a correction scheme to minimize the beam pattern impact. The method can be applied to both, level-2 OCN da-ta products and level-1 original IW image data.