Methods of obtaining offshore wind direction and sea-state data from X-band aircraft SAR imagery of coastal waters

X-band synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imagery of the Goto Islands of Japan was digitally analyzed to extract air-sea interaction parameters and to assess the potential of texture measures in analysis of SAR ocean imagery. Wind direction is extracted from wind rows, wind streaks, and random turbulence patterns observed in the SAR imagery. Sea-state parameters are either extracted directly from the imagery or estimated using the extracted information in previously established empirical formulas. A convenient method of digitally presenting imagery, local power spectra, and the extracted/estimated parameters is presented. Texture analysis based on gray-level co-occurrence (GLC) matrices is applied to SAR ocean imagery. The inertia measure is shown to extract similar information to the power spectrum. The cluster-shade measure is shown to be sensitive to image phase.