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IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON GEOSCIENCE AND REMOTE SENSING
SAR Speckle Dependence on Ocean
Surface Wind Field
Maurizio Migliaccio , Fellow, IEEE, Lanqing Huang , Student Member, IEEE,
and Andrea Buono , Student Member, IEEE
Abstract— A novel physical paradigm is explored in this paper:
synthetic-aperture radar (SAR) ocean speckle is informative. This
paper experimentally analyzes the SAR ocean speckle intensity
K-distribution model versus sea-surface wind field. It is shown
that the normalized intensity moments of the K-distribution
measured from actual C-band SAR data well fit the theoretical
ones under different wind conditions, i.e., wind regime and
relative SAR-wind azimuth direction. In addition, it is observed
that the K-distribution shape parameter decreases as wind speed
increases. A sensitivity of the K-distribution shape parameter on
incidence angle and wind direction is also observed, where the
largest variability is experienced at higher incidence angles and
under crosswind relative azimuth angle.
Index Terms— K-distribution, sea surface, speckle, synthetic-
aperture radar (SAR), wind speed.
I. I NTRODUCTION
T HE oceans cover over 70% of the Earth’s surface, car-
rying out about 50% of global primary production and
hosting the widest biodiversity on the planet. They are also
one of the largest carbon reservoirs on the Earth, storing up
to 54 times more carbon than the atmosphere. The oceans
also regulate the climate on the Earth, supply living and
nonliving resources and provide social and economic goods
and services [1].
Ocean monitoring plays a key role in all World
Meteorological Organization (WMO) programs. WMO
included the knowledge of surface wind speed as one of
the 16 essential climate variables (ECVs), which is the
set of physical/chemical/biological variables that jointly
contribute, at most, to the characterization of the Earth’s
climate [2]. ECVs include surface, upper atmosphere,
and atmospheric composition parameters as precipitation,
Earth’s radiation budget, and ozone, respectively. European
Commission also promoted, under the program “Blue
Growth,” a set of policy actions regarding oceans, seas, and
Manuscript received July 4, 2018; revised January 10, 2019 and
February 11, 2019; accepted February 12, 2019. This work was supported
in part by the Università degli Studi di Napoli “Parthenope” under the Project
“Ricerca Competitiva - DING 202” and in part by the State Key Program
of the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant 61331015.
(Corresponding author: Maurizio Migliaccio.)
M. Migliaccio and A. Buono are with the Dipartimento di Ingegneria,
Università degli Studi di Napoli “Parthenope,” 80143 Naples, Italy (e-mail:
migliaccio@uniparthenope.it; andrea.buono@uniparthenope.it).
L. Huang is with the Shanghai Key Laboratory of Intelligent Sensing and
Recognition, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai 200240, China (e-mail:
huanglanqing@sjtu.edu.cn).
Color versions of one or more of the figures in this paper are available
online at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org.
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/TGRS.2019.2899491
0196-2892 © 2019 IEEE. Personal use is permitted, but republication/redistribution requires IEEE permission.
See http://www.ieee.org/publications_standards/publications/rights/index.html for more information.
1
coasts, to support and strengthen the cooperation, across
borders and sectors, between maritime business, public
authorities, and stakeholders to ensure the sustainability of
the marine environment [3]. In addition, sea-surface wind
field is attracting growing attention from engineers and in
order to boost the sustainable development by exploiting new
“clean” energy sources (e.g., to plan and implement offshore
wind energy farms).
In the microwave range of the electromagnetic spectrum,
ocean scattering is ruled by its physical characteristics.
Wind-roughened ocean surface results from complex nonlinear
interactions which are time-dependent and affected by the
atmospheric boundary layer [4]. Generally speaking, when
the wind blows, short waves that are aligned to the wind
direction are generated first, and then, while it continues to
blow, large waves are generated until equilibrium is reached.
This reference case, usually assumed in synthetic-aperture
radar (SAR) ocean modeling, is known as a fully developed
sea [4]. Whenever the fully developed sea case is in question
and no swell or coastal effects are present, it is possible
to relate the ocean roughness to the local wind speed and
direction, i.e., wind field, by proper modeling [5], [6]. The
latter led to the development of an ad hoc sensor specifically
designed to estimate high-quality mesoscale wind field over
the oceans: the scatterometer [5], [6].
Since it is not meant to estimate ocean wind field, in the case
of SAR observations, the task is much more complicated and
a two-scale scattering model, which embodies both the large-
and small-scale roughnesses, must properly be taken into
account. Under low-to-moderate wind regime and at interme-
diate incidence angles, i.e., ≈20◦ –60◦, the main sea-scattering
mechanism is described by the tilted Bragg surface scattering
model, while under higher wind regimes different scattering
mechanisms may concur to the backscattered signal measured
by the SAR antenna. In fact, SAR is a microwave narrowband
coherent imaging system that estimates the complex reflec-
tivity of ocean surface in an “imperfect” manner [7]. The
SAR processing chain generates fine-spatial resolution images
by means of two very different scanning mechanisms. First,
in the range direction, the spatial resolution is determined
by the linearly modulated chirp pulses traveling at one-half
the speed of light, i.e., in all respects instantaneous. Second,
in the azimuth direction, the spatial resolution is determined
by the platform motion that composes the temporal long array,
i.e., at a velocity that is sensible to time-varying scenes.
In addition, the SAR imaging of the actual reflectivity is made
at the spatial resolution scale and, therefore, “imperfect” [7].
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2 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON GEOSCIENCE AND REMOTE SENSING
Finally, within each resolution cell, because of the narrowband
coherent nature of the SAR, fading due to the interference of
the ensemble of elementary scatterers within the cell generates,
in SAR imagery, the so-called speckle [7]. The latter is often
meant as uninformative, and in several automatic procedures,
there is the need to reduce it at expenses of spatial resolution
(see [8]).
In this paper, an alternative paradigm is explored. Since
speckle is a geophysical signal, under proper modeling, it can
be exploited to infer physical information from the observed
scene. In the literature, particular attention has been paid to the
ocean case, and several theoretical and experimental papers
have been published (see [9]–[15]), and therefore, a brief
review of the state-of-the-art is due.
The backscattered signal coming from a single resolution
cell, modeled as a coherent sum of a finite number of discrete
scatterers calling for randomly phased contributions to the far-
field, has been investigated in seminal papers [9], [10].
In [9], the seminal contribute regards the use of the
K-distribution to model the intensity signal scattered off a
single ocean resolution cell, while in [10], the K-distribution
is furthered along a birth-and-death process model where
the normalized intensity moments (NIMs) are first pro-
vided as a benchmark test. In [11], an X-band airborne
SAR experimental campaign is described and analyzed in
terms of K-distributed speckle intensity, where the NIMs
logarithmic plot is exploited to support the K-distribution
model.
In the fundamental paper [12], the K-distributed speckle
intensity of a SAR ocean scene is seen as a proxy of sea
state. The authors, by means of numerical simulations, first
claimed that the number of elementary scatterers is directly
related to the sea state, and then, they theoretically predicted
the K-distribution shape parameter at the variance of sea state.
In particular, they stated that the smaller is the K-distribution
shape parameter the rougher the ocean surface is. In this
model-based study, the authors also observed a dependence
of the K-distribution shape parameter with respect to the
SAR incidence angle and wave direction. In conclusion,
the authors stated that “an indication of the magnitude of
the K-distribution shape parameter is probably sufficient to
characterize the type of sea state (ranging from calm to high).”
In [13], a C-band air- and space-borne SAR experimental
campaign is described and analyzed in terms of K-distributed
speckle intensity. Two SAR scenes were considered under two
different wind speeds, i.e., 6 and 12 m/s, leading to four cases
that were critically discussed. In particular, it is shown that the
K-distribution is affected by the SAR incidence angle and the
relative wind azimuth angle and that the K-distribution shape
parameter is larger in the 12 m/s case. This result does not
agree with the findings suggested in [12]. In [14] and [15],
a physically based speckle model for marine single-look
complex (SLC) SAR images is proposed and exploited for sea
oil slick and metallic target detection purposes, respectively.
The model allows exploiting full-resolution SAR images
instead of multilook ones by including, for scattering intensity,
the Rayleigh distribution, K-distribution and Rice distribution
that are typical of the ocean and coastal scenes.
In this paper, for the first time, an experimental study based
on a large high-quality, fine radiometric resolution, C-band
Sentinel-1 SLC SAR data is accomplished where space and
time colocated HaiYang-2 (HY-2) scatterometer and Advanced
Microwave Scanning Radiometer (AMSR)-2 radiometer mea-
surements are also collected to provide ancillary wind speed
and precipitation information, respectively. The aim of this
paper is to show that SAR ocean speckle is informative and
can be considered as a proxy of ocean surface wind speed. Fur-
thering the ideas of the seminal background papers [9]–[15],
the K-distribution model adopted to describe the SAR ocean
speckle intensity is analyzed with respect to different wind
speeds, wind directions, and SAR incidence angles.
Experimental results show that the theoretical K-distribution
NIMs will fit the NIMs estimated from actual SAR
data in all cases and that the shape parameter of the
K-distribution decreases as wind speed increases, according
to the model-based predictions in [12]. Furthermore, as also
experienced in [13], a dependence of the K-distribution shape
parameter on incidence angle and wind direction is found,
where the largest variability is observed at crosswind relative
azimuth angle. It must be stressed that demonstrating, under
proper modeling, SAR ocean speckle is informative, has
important implications on SAR ocean applications. In fact,
the knowledge of ocean wind speed is important for mon-
itoring and predicting weather patterns and has an impact
on surface water evaporation, mixing, and the development
of seiches and storm surges. Hence, the unique benefit of
SAR sensors to make measurements at finer spatial scale,
if compared to mesoscale scatterometers, is of applicative
relevance. Furthermore, SAR applications as sea oil spill
detection and zoning, as well as small target detection, call
for perfectly colocated wind speed knowledge [16]–[19].
The remainder of this paper is organized as follows. The
theoretical background is described in Section II, the data set
is presented in Section III, while experiments are presented
and discussed in Section IV, and the final conclusions are
drawn in Section V.
II. T HEORETICAL BACKGROUND
Since SAR is a narrowband coherent remote sensing sensor,
its macroscopically homogeneous resolution cell gives rise to
a random backscattering that, at the image level, is known
as speckle. In fact, at microwave wavelengths, natural scenes
exhibit roughness at such a scale, i.e., microscopic. Hence,
the wave backscattered from a resolution cell consists of con-
tributions from an ensemble of elementary backscattered fields
that coherently sum up to a single observable backscattered
field E(r). As a result, the random nature of the speckle can
be modeled as a 2-D random walk along the complex plane
as described in [9].
Hence, for each resolution cell, the linearly polarized
(random) backscattered field measured by the SAR antenna
can be written as the sum of Ns elementary fields [9]

Ns
E(r) = an (r)e j ϕn (r) (1)
n=1
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MIGLIACCIO et al.: SAR SPECKLE DEPENDENCE ON OCEAN SURFACE WIND FIELD
where r is the distance between the SAR antenna and the
imaged scatterer, j is the imaginary unit, while an (r) and
ϕn (r) are the amplitude and relative phase, respectively, which
characterize the field scattered off the nth elementary scatterer.
Equation (1) can be seen as an Ns -step 2-D random walk
in the complex plane where an and ϕn represent the nth
step. Assuming statistical independence between an s and ϕn s,
if Ns is a given asymptotically large number, and if ϕn s
are uniformly distributed, the central-limit theorem applies
and the fully developed speckle regime is in place [9], [10].
Accordingly, the backscattered field is a zero-mean circu-
lar complex Gaussian process whose amplitude and inten-
sity are Rayleigh- and negative exponential (NE)-distributed,
respectively [9], [10].
In the case of SAR ocean imaging, the former assumptions
must be adjusted to model non-Gaussian processes [9], [10].
In fact, when the SAR illuminates an ocean area of linear
dimensions comparable to the longer ocean wavelengths,
the modulation of small-scale roughness by the larger ones
cannot be neglected leading to the well-known bunching
phenomenon that characterizes ocean surface [14]. This phe-
nomenon can be included in the random walk (1) taking Ns as
a random variable that follows a negative binomial distribution,
ruled by the nonnegative parameter ν. Hence, the nonfully
developed K-distribution speckle model is found [9]. Accord-
ingly, the probability density function (pdf) of the intensity of
the backscattered field (I = |E|2 ) is given by [9]
 
2 ν+1 ν−1 2√
f (I ) = ν 2 I 2 K ν−1 νI
(ν)μν+1 μ I (n) = n!
where K ν−1 (·) is the modified Bessel function of the second
kind of order ν − 1, (·) is the Eulerian gamma function, ν is
the shape parameter which is an indicator of the departure
from the complex Gaussian statistic, while the parameter
μ is the square root of the mean intensity of the local
backscattering [14].
Before proceeding further, it must be stressed that the
estimation of pdf parameters is a key point to fully charac-
terize the speckle model and, therefore, needs to be carefully
considered [13], [14], [20], [21]. The most common estima-
tion techniques include, among the others, the classical method
of moments, the maximum likelihood estimation, and the
method of log cumulants [22]–[24]. Nevertheless, even though
they yield to accurate estimation of the K-distribution parame-
ters, they can be very involved, rather cumbersome and quite
time-consuming [25]. Hence, a viable and effective solution to
the problem is to estimate the K-distribution shape parameter
ν by equating measured and theoretical K-distribution second-
order NIMs as proposed in [25] and [26]. In this paper,
the theoretical and experimental NIMs are employed to test
the goodness of the K-distribution to model speckle amplitude
following the guidelines suggested in [11].
The theoretical NIMs of the intensity K-distribution speckle
model are [10], [25]
(n + ν)
I (n) = n!
ν n (ν)
3
Fig. 1. Map of the footprints relevant to the Sentinel-1 SLC IW VV-polarized
SAR acquisitions collected over the North-East Atlantic.
where I (n) is the nth NIM, while NIMs are estimated for each
SAR resolution cell according to [11]
1 N
(n) E (I n ) I n (i )
I = n =  i=1
N
n (4)
E (I ) 1 N
I (i )
N i=1
where E (·) stands for statistical expectation, I (i ) is the
intensity of the i th pixel, and N is the number of pixels.
In this paper, the theoretical NE-distributed NIMs given
by [10], [25]
(2)
(5)
are also considered for reference purpose.
III. DATA S ET
The SAR data set consists of 33 Sentinel-1 SLC SAR
images collected in interferometric wide (IW) swath mode in
vertical transmitting, vertical receiving (VV) polarization over
open ocean regions of the North-East Atlantic Ocean in the
period May–November 2017 (see Fig. 1 and Table I). SAR
imagery, characterized by a pixel spacing of 2.3 m × 17.4 m
(range × azimuth) and by a range of incidence angles, θ of
about 30◦ –42◦, is radiometrically calibrated and geocoded.
Wind field information is provided by HY-2A satellite
scatterometer sea-surface wind data that call for 25 km ×
25 km cell spacing and are characterized by a wind speed
agreement of ± 1.3 m/s with respect to the buoy data [27].
SAR imagery is time/space colocated with HY-2A
sea-surface wind vectors as suggested in [28], considering
only SAR acquisitions collected within ± 30 min with
respect to HY-2A wind products. As a result, SAR cells
that consist of 100 × 100 pixels (about 450 m × 1800 m)
centered on HY-2A-derived wind vectors are selected to
perform the speckle statistical analysis. SLC information is
retained since spatial averaging, i.e., multilook processing,
affects the original sea-surface SAR speckle information [29].
In addition, the SAR cells are also time/space colocated with
(3)
precipitation information derived from the AMSR-2 Level-3
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4 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON GEOSCIENCE AND REMOTE SENSING
TABLE I
A CQUISITION D ATES AND T IMES OF THE S ENTINEL -1 SAR D ATA S ET
global products provided on a 0.25◦ × 0.25◦ resolution grid.
All the above-mentioned preprocessing steps (data collection,
radiometric calibration, geocoding, and colocation) ensure
selecting, at the variance of wind regime, rain-free SAR wind
cells only.
As a result, a “premium” data set composed of 662 SAR
wind cells is obtained which is further divided into six subsets
at variance of incidence angle: θ ∈ [31◦, 32◦ ), θ ∈ [33◦, 34◦ ),
θ ∈ [34◦, 35◦ ), θ ∈ [35◦, 36◦ ), θ ∈ [38◦ , 39◦ ), and θ ∈
[41◦, 42◦ ). Wind regimes are characterized by specific ranges
of wind speed, U . According to the Beaufort wind force
scale, low, moderate, high, and extreme wind regimes are
characterized by U < 10.8 m/s, U ∈ [10.8, 17.1 m/s),
U ∈ [17.1, 24.5 m/s), and U ≥ 24.5 m/s, respectively [30].
The highest wind speed observed in the data set is 30.9 m/s.
When dealing with SAR speckle dependence on wind direc-
tion, reference is made to the relative azimuth angle χ as
defined in [31], where conventional oceanographic standard,
i.e., χ = 0◦ , ± 90◦ , and 180◦ referring to upwind, crosswind,
and downwind case, respectively, is adopted.
IV. E XPERIMENTS
In this section, experiments undertaken on the “premium”
SAR data set presented in Section III are described and
discussed to investigate the dependence of SAR speckle with
respect to sea-surface wind speed and direction, and SAR
incidence angle. Section IV-A deals with the determination
of the goodness of the K-distribution model, evaluated by
comparing theoretical NIMs with the ones estimated from
actual SAR data, while Section IV-B deals with the analysis
of the relationship between the K-distribution shape parameter
ν and the wind speed U , as well as its dependence to wind
direction and incidence angle.
A. K-Distribution Model
The NIMs estimated over SAR wind cells (see blue curve)
representative of each wind regime in crosswind case and
the theoretical K-distributed NIMs (see red curve) are shown
in Fig. 2. The NE-distributed NIMs are also plotted for ref-
erence purposes (see green curve). All NIMs are shown, on a
semilogarithmic scale, up to the seventh order as suggested
in [11]. Under all the wind regimes, it can be noted that the
agreement between the estimated NIMs and the theoretical
K-distributed NIMs is remarkable. In addition, K-distribution
performs better than NE-distribution in fitting actual SAR
speckle pdf, especially when wind speed increases. In fact,
the largest departure between K- and NE-distributed NIMs
is observed, at higher order, under high and extreme wind
regimes, i.e., U > 17.1 m/s, likely due to the fact that
sea-surface Bragg scattering, on which NE-distribution relies
on, no longer applies.
This result is also confirmed by a quantitative analysis
performed on estimated and theoretical pdfs by evaluating their
root mean square error (RMSE) and correlation coefficient
(R 2 ), see Table II at the variance of θ and U . In all cases,
the K-pdf calls for RMSE (R 2 ) values lower (slightly larger)
than the NE pdf. In particular, the K-distribution RMSE (R 2 )
values are always lower (larger) than 0.005 (0.993). Note that
no sample belonging to the SAR data set is collected at higher
incidence angles, i.e., θ > 36◦, under extreme wind conditions,
i.e., U ≥ 24.5 m/s.
Further analysis is made to consider the goodness of the
K-distribution model at the variance of the relative azimuth
angle χ. Given the high wind regime, three representative
cases, i.e., upwind, downwind, and crosswind, are shown
in Fig. 3(a)–(c), respectively. Even in this case, a fair agree-
ment between the estimated and theoretical K-distributed
NIMs is observed, while significant departure from the
measured NIMs is in place when dealing with theoretical
NE-distributed ones. The corresponding RMSE and R 2 val-
ues, evaluated over the 662 SAR wind cells, relevant to
theoretical and estimated pdfs are listed in Table III. In all
cases, the K pdf is characterized by RMSE (R 2 ) values
lower (slightly larger) than the NE pdf, with K-distribution
RMSE (R 2 ) values that are always lower (larger) than 0.003
(0.996).
As a summary, the statistical analysis undertaken on the
considered “premium” SAR data set clearly confirms the
goodness of the K-distribution model to describe SAR ocean
intensity speckle.
B. ν-Model
The physical model that relies on the theoretical predictions
proposed in [12], hereinafter referred as ν-model, is here con-
sidered to analyze the relationship between the K-distribution
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MIGLIACCIO et al.: SAR SPECKLE DEPENDENCE ON OCEAN SURFACE WIND FIELD 5

TABLE II
RMSE AND R 2 VALUES FOR D IFFERENT I NCIDENCE A NGLES AND W IND R EGIMES

Fig. 2. NIM plots evaluated for four wind cells under different wind regimes in the crosswind case. Blue curve: measured NIMs. Green curve: theoretical
NE NIMs. Red curve: theoretical K NIMs. (a) Low wind regime (mean U = 9.39 m/s). (b) Moderate wind regime: (mean U = 13.55 m/s). (c) High wind
regime: (mean U = 17.50 m/s). (d) Extreme wind regime (mean U = 28.54 m/s).

shape parameter ν and wind speed U . Accordingly, an NE
function for the ν-model is proposed
ν = ν0 e−U/U0
where the parameters ν0 and U0 are expected to be dependent
on SAR incidence angle and wind direction [12], [13]. Hence,
in order to investigate the dependence of the ν-model with
respect to θ and χ, the behavior of ν versus the reference wind
speed U is shown in Fig. 4 for different incidence and relative
azimuth angles. The figure is organized in a matrix format
(6)
where rows (columns) refer to different incidence (relative
azimuth) angles. The data samples relevant to the shape
parameter estimated from the SAR wind cells by means of
NIMs are plotted with blue dots, while the theoretical ν-model
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6 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON GEOSCIENCE AND REMOTE SENSING

Fig. 3. NIM plots evaluated for three wind cells under different relative azimuth angles in high wind regime. Blue curve: measured NIMs. Green curve:
theoretical NE NIMs. Red curve: theoretical K NIMs. (a) Upwind. (b) Downwind. (c) Crosswind.

TABLE III
RMSE AND R 2 VALUES FOR D IFFERENT I NCIDENCE A NGLES AND R ELATIVE A ZIMUTH A NGLES

[see (6)] is shown as a blue curve. The ±2σ confidence
interval boundaries are also shown, depicted in red dashed
lines, in order to identify the model outliers, i.e., the data
samples falling outside the ±2σ range with respect to the
theoretical ν-model [28]. The data samples dispersion σ is also
considered as an indicator of the reliability of results related
to the sensitivity of the ν parameter with respect to sea-surface
wind speed. Quantitative results are summarized in Table IV,
where the estimated ν-model parameters ν0 and U0 , the data
samples dispersion σ and the percentage of model outliers are
listed at the variance of θ and χ, confirming the suitability of
the ν-model.
The estimated ν-model parameters demonstrate that the
dependence of the ν-model with respect to χ is more pro-
nounced than the one with respect to θ . It can also be noted
that, in the up/downwind case, ν0 and U0 exhibit a global
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MIGLIACCIO et al.: SAR SPECKLE DEPENDENCE ON OCEAN SURFACE WIND FIELD 7

Fig. 4. ν-model: scatterplot of the NIM-measured ν values versus the reference wind speed U at variance of incidence angle θ (along different rows) and
relative wind direction χ (along different columns). Blue curves refer to nonlinear least squares best fit according to the theoretical ν mode [see (6)], while
red dashed curves represent the ± 2σ confidence interval boundaries. The number of samples and the percentage of outliers are also annotated.

trend which is almost increasing with SAR incidence angle, for the up/downwind case if compared to the crosswind
except for U0 when θ ∈ [41◦, 42◦ ), while no clear trend can be one.
observed in the crosswind case (see Table IV). Nonetheless, When dealing with the reliability of the results, the data
given the incidence angle, lower ν0 (larger U0 ) values apply samples dispersion is considered. σ values lower than about
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8 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON GEOSCIENCE AND REMOTE SENSING
TABLE IV
ν-M ODEL PARAMETERS FOR U P /D OWNWIND AND C ROSSWIND
C ASES U NDER D IFFERENT I NCIDENCE A NGLES
3.7 are measured in any incidence and relative azimuth angle
condition (see Table IV). However, it can be noted that,
globally, larger σ values are experienced under crosswind
condition and at larger incidence angles most likely due to
lower signal-to-noise ratio. The increasing trend of σ with
respect to θ is clearer in the crosswind case, where almost the
same number of samples is considered for all the incidence
angles. In the up/downwind case, instead, exceptionally large
σ values (i.e., 3.43, see Table IV) can be likely due to the lower
number of samples considered for some incidence angles,
i.e., 37 data samples for θ ∈ [38◦ , 39◦ ).
When dealing with the goodness evaluation of the proposed
ν-model, the percentage of model outliers is considered. A first
visual inspection clearly shows that the ν-model allows well
predicting the behavior of the K-distribution shape parameter
at the variance of wind speed and incidence angle. This obser-
vation is confirmed by the percentage of model outliers, which
is lower than 16% for any θ and χ (see Table IV). In addition,
it can be noted that, in crosswind case, the percentage of model
outliers is significantly lower than in the up/downwind case
(lower than 4% for any θ value) due to the larger dispersion
exhibited by the data samples that affects the confidence
interval bounds.
V. C ONCLUSION
In this paper, the dependence of SAR speckle on sea-surface
wind field is investigated by means of a large “premium” SAR
data set that consists of 662 Sentinel-1 SLC IW VV-polarized
wind cells (100 × 100 pixels) which are time/space colocated
with HY-2A measurements and AMSR-2 Level-3 products in
order to ensure wind vector diversity and rain-free conditions.
Experimental results demonstrate that the SAR ocean
speckle is informative, and under the K-distribution statistical
framework, it can be related to sea-surface wind speed.
The main novelties and outcomes can be summarized as
follows.
1) The K-distribution NIMs well fit the ones estimated from
SAR data along the whole range of considered wind
speeds and directions.
2) The ν-model that relates the K-distribution shape para-
meter ν to the wind speed U is first introduced.
3) The K-distribution shape parameter ν decreases when
the wind speed U increases, as theoretically predicted
by simulations in [12].
4) The analysis of the ν-model shows that it depends
on both SAR incidence angle θ and relative azimuth
angle χ, with the latter than mainly influences its
behavior.
Future work will include considering other SAR sensor data
and configurations.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
The authors would like to thank the European Space Agency
for providing the Sentinel-1 SAR data under the Dragon 4
Project ID 32235 and the Sentinel Application Platform free
of charge.
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9
Maurizio Migliaccio (M’91–SM’00–F’17) was
born in Naples, Italy, in 1962. He received the Lau-
rea degree (Hons.) in electronic engineering from
the Università degli Studi di Napoli "Federico II,"
Naples, in 1987.
Since 2005, he has been a Full Professor of
electromagnetics with the Università degli Studi di
Naples “Parthenope,” Naples. Since 2013, he has
been an Affiliated Full Professor with NOVA
Southeastern University, Fort Lauderdale, FL, USA.
He has authored or co-authored more than 150 peer-
reviewed journal papers on remote sensing and applied electromagnetics. His
research interests include remote sensing for marine and coastal applications,
polarimetry, inverse problem for resolution enhancement, and reverberating
chambers.
Lanqing Huang (S’18) was born in Xi’an, China,
in 1993. She received the B.Sc. degree in communi-
cation engineering from Xi’an Jiao Tong University,
Xi’an, in 2015. She is currently pursuing the Ph.D.
degree with the Department of Electronic Engi-
neering, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai,
China.
Her research interests include synthetic-aperture
radar (SAR) image interpretation, particularly SAR
marine surveillance, SAR observation of ocean, and
statistical analyses of SAR image.
Andrea Buono (S’14) was born in Naples, Italy,
in 1984. He received the Ph.D. degree in informa-
tion engineering from the Università degli Studi di
Napoli “Parthenope,” Naples, in 2017.
Since 2018, he has been a Researcher in
electromagnetic fields with the Università degli
Studi di Napoli “Parthenope.” He has authored
or co-authored more than 50 scientific publica-
tions among peer-reviewed journal papers and ref-
ereed conference proceedings. His research interests
include applied electromagnetics, including elec-
tromagnetic modeling, single-polarization and multipolarization sea-surface
scattering, radar polarimetry, synthetic-aperture radar ocean, and coastal area
monitoring.