A STUDY ON POLARIMETRIC SCATTEROMETER SIMULATION AND WIND VECTOR RETRIEVAL

Polarimetric scatterometer is new type of scatterometers which can further improve the wind retrieval performance by using the fully polarized signals echoed from the ocean surface. An end-to-end system simulation software is proposed and developed for the conically scanning fully polarized scatterometers in this paper. The simulation software can generate the simulated backscatter coefficients and perform wind vector retrieval. Simulation experiments indicated that compared with the traditional co-polaried scatterometer, about 4. improvement in wind direction retrieval can be achieved by the polarimetric scatterometer under the same input system parameters. Moreover, some backscatter measurement data from an aircraft flight test in China Sea were processed to verify the odd-symmetry property of the polarimetric correlation coefficients.