TerraSAR-X Products and Methods for Surface Currents Retrieval

Abstract

The purpose of this presentation is to investigate about the estimation of surface currents directly on SAR stripmap focused data. The algorithm relies on efficient baseband magnitude-based Doppler centroid estimation: we prevent our estimate from any possible bias, generated by azimuth ambiguities, selecting the portion of the spectrum less affected by them. The Doppler shift generated by currents is computed using the geometric Doppler as reference or, if a land/water mask is provided as input, a homogeneous section of the land. The accuracy of the estimation is predicted and a validation of the algorithm is made with a TerraSAR-X acquisition over the Elbe river estuary. An introduction to the geometric corrections annotated on TerraSAR-X products is also presented; these corrections are useful for many applications like the precise geolocation of objects in SAR scenes or the transformation between geographic and slant range coordinates.