Detecting and tracking small scale eddies in the black sea and the Baltic Sea using high-resolution Radarsat-2 and TerraSAR-X imagery (DTeddie)

High-resolution Synthetic Aperture radar (SAR) images of coastal and off-coastal areas provide a nearly weather independent monitoring of small-scale oceanographic features. In this paper, we describe the advances, which have been achieved within the DTeddie project. Therefore, we present the application of formerly developed algorithms to high-resolution SAR data to estimate the sea surface current at sub-mesoscale. Inside the derived current sea surface current fields, vortical structures, e.g. eddies, will be detected by means of local current anomalies. Another approach uses the alignment of anchored ships as an indicator of the sea surface current. To infer dependent information for each ship, we present an automatic registration method between coastal photographs and the SAR images. Both approaches have proven to yield valuable results with respect to the detection of vortical current flows at sub-mesoscale.