A Rotating Knife-beam Altimeter for Wide-swath Remote Sensing of Ocean: Wind and Waves

The use of a nadir altimeter radar with a rotating knife-beam antenna pattern is considered for improved measurements of the sea surface wind and wave parameters over a wide swath. Theoretical calculations suggest the antenna beam rotating about the vertical axis is able to provide wide swath of order 250-350 km. Processing of the signals using time or Doppler sampling techniques results in the division of the antenna footprint into elementary scattering cells of the order of 14×14 km. The theoretical algorithms developed here indicate that the system may be used to retrieve the variance of large-scale slopes, the direction of wave propagation and the wind speed in each cell. The possibility of measuring significant wave height is also analyzed. The combination of linear motion of the radar and the rotation of the knife-beam antenna can be exploited to build up a two-dimensional map of the surface, which enables better understanding of wave processes and to study their structure and temporal dynamics using repeated observations.