Development and Validation of Empirical Wave Retrieval Algorithms for Sentinel-1 Synthetic Aperture Radar in HH-Polarization

In our work, three empirical algorithms for significant wave height (SWH) retrieval have been tuned for horizontal-horizontal (HH) polarization Sentinel-1 SAR. We extracted more than ten thousand sub-scenes from available 200 images, which were treated as a dataset with collocated SWH from European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) reanalysis wave data at a 0.125 ° grid. Two algorithms are based on the relation between SWH and azimuthal cutoff wavelength named CSAR_WAVEs and the other is called XWAVE which was originally explored for SWH retrieval from X-band SAR data. The three empirical algorithms have been tuned for HH-polarization Sentinel-1 SAR through the dataset. Additional 83 HH-polarization Sentinel-1 SAR images were carried out to retrieve SWH by using the four algorithms. Although the three algorithms allow estimating SWH from HH-polarization Sentinel-1 SAR, the algorithm herein called CSAR_WAVE_S is recommended for use due to less comparative error of a 0.57m STD of SWH

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