The motivation of this work is to explore the possibility of typhoon wave retrieval (the main parameter is significant wave height (SWH)) for C-band Gaofen (GF-3) synthetic aperture radar (SAR) with a wide swath coverage (>400 km). We aim to establish an analysis of a typhoon wave in the subresolution-scale (approximately 20 × 20 km²) on GF-3 SAR through SAR-measured parameters, including a normalized radar cross section (NRCS) and variance of the normalized SAR image (herein called cvar), which are the basic variables in an empirical wave retrieval algorithm and are independent of visible wave streaks. Several typhoons around the China Seas were captured by Chinese GF-3 SAR in 2017; e.g., Noru, Doksuri, Talim and Hato. The wave fields simulated from the third-generation numerical wave model WAVEWATCH-III (WW3) are collocated with these images. In general, the distribution patterns of the typhoon waves from the WW3 model are consistent with wave fields from the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) at 0.125° grids, indicating that the simulation results from the WW3 model are suitable for our study. In addition to winds retrieved from GF-3 SAR images in vertical-horizontal (VH) polarization, the characteristics of the typhoon wave on vertical-vertical (VV) polarization GF-3 SAR images are studied. It is found that SWH has a linear relationship with NRCS and cvar, however, SWH fluctuates with wind speed at all incidence angles. Based on the analyzed results, we simply tune two empirical wave retrieval algorithms for GF-3 SAR in typhoons. Although the correlation (COR) reaches 0.5 taking account into the NRCS term, a more accurate retrieval algorithm, including more related terms, is anticipated for further development for GF-3 SAR and validated through more typhoon images.
Keywords: Gaofen-3 synthetic aperture radar; VV-polarization; typhoon wave.