ESTIMATING OCEAN CURRENTS IN KOREAN COASTS BY SAR: PRESENT STATUS

Abstract

Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) is one of the most effective tools for observing the environment of Earth and the ocean. This paper reports the present status on the project of estimating ocean currents in the Korean coastal waters. The principle of current estimation is based on the shift of Doppler centroid in SAR images of currents havingthe slant-range (line-of-sight) velocity component, where the slant-range velocity of current flow can be computed by measuring the difference between Doppler centroids of stationary surface and moving currents. In the present paper, an outline of the previous studies is summarized, and the effects of interaction between surface currents and bottomtopography observed by SAR images of the west coast of the Korean Peninsula are described.