SAR Speckle as a Proxy of Sea Surface Wind Speed

In this paper, a new simple and effective methodology, based on the K-distribution statistical modeling of speckle over sea surface backscattering, is applied on a large dataset of single- look complex (SLC) VV-polarized C-band Sentinel-1 SAR scenes to evaluate the sensitivity of speckle-related parameters, i. e., the K-distribution shape parameter ν, on sea surface wind field. The proposed approach is validated through the time/space co- location of scatterometer winds and precipitation data that are used as reliable source of wind field information.Experimental results show that the K-distribution is suitable to model sea surface speckle and that the latter is informative, i. e., it can be considered as a proxy of sea surface wind speed.