An airborne ocean surveillance SAR system and preliminary experiments

Abstract

Oceanology is playing an important role in economy and social development. Ocean surveillance is of great importance for protecting maritime interests, marine pollution monitoring and shipping management. Microwave sensing of the ocean using synthetic aperture radar (SAR) is effective and of great interest because of the high spatial resolution, high precision information extraction capability and the almost instantaneous observation potential of large ocean areas. Airborne SAR can implement instantaneous detection to specific area, which is very valuable for emphasis marine area and emergency surveillance. In this paper, an airborne ocean surveillance SAR system is introduced and its application experiment results are demonstrated. Experiment results show the great potential of SAR in ocean applications.