Perspectives for Sentinel-1 Level-2 Ocean Products

Abstract:
Copernicus/ESA Sentinel-1 C-band SAR constellation mission is now operating since 2014. All Level-1 products acquired over ocean are systematically processed into Level-2 Ocean products (L2OCN) by ESA PDGS and disseminated to the users through the Copernicus webportal. Level-2 Expert Support Laboratories from Sentinel-1 Mission Performance Centre are in charge of validating, monitoring and improving the quality of this product. Several attempts to fully take full benefit of the novelty of this mission. In particular, this paper demonstrates that the use of the phase in combination to the intensity together with the dual-polarization capabilities opens perspectives for increasing the constraints on the ocean surface wind direction retrieval (i) to possibly remove the use of any ancillary data in the inversion scheme and (ii) to extend the wind speed range, leading to a unique potential for measuring ocean surface wind field at high resolution in extreme events such as Tropical Cyclones, Medicanes or polar lows. Additionally, the capability to better describe ocean waves is presented. It shows the potential to overcome SAR limitations to image short waves by providing measurements of the total Hs for Wave Mode and then TOPS Mode. This will help better constraining the problem for eventually estimate full directional wave spectra.