• Korean Journal of Remote Sensing
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• v.34 no.6_3
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• pp.1383-1398
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• 2018

Sea surface wind is one of the most fundamental variables for understanding diverse marine phenomena. Although scatterometers have produced global wind field data since the early 1990's, the data has been used limitedly in oceanic applications due to it slow spatial resolution, especially at coastal regions. Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) is capable to produce high resolution wind field data. KOMPSAT-5 is the first Korean satellite equipped with X-band SAR instrument and is able to retrieve the sea surface wind. This study presents the validation results of sea surface wind derived from the KOMPSAT-5 backscattering coefficient data for the first time. We collected 18 KOMPSAT-5 ES mode data to produce a matchup database collocated with buoy stations. In order to calculate the accurate wind speed, we preprocessed the SAR data, including land masking, speckle noise reduction, and ship detection, and converted the in-situ wind to 10-m neutral wind as reference wind data using Liu-Katsaros-Businger (LKB) model. The sea surface winds based on XMOD2 show root-mean-square errors of about $2.41-2.74m\;s^{-1}$ depending on backscattering coefficient conversion equations. In-depth analyses on the wind speed errors derived from KOMPSAT-5 backscattering coefficient data reveal the existence of diverse potential error factors such as image quality related to range ambiguity, discrete and discontinuous distribution of incidence angle, change in marine atmospheric environment, impacts on atmospheric gravity waves, ocean wave spectrum, and internal wave.