The scatterometer is a real aperture radar capable to perform a set of normalized radar cross section measurements under different azimuth angles for each resolution cell. The main field of application of a wind scatterometer regards the sea surface wind field determination. As a matter of fact, once such measurements have been performed it is possible to determine the sea surface wind field by means of an inversion procedure. In this paper we present a novel inversion scheme which is an evolution of the procedure nowday used by the Italian Space Agency (ASI) under the Italian Processing and Archiving Facility (I-PAF). A full comparative study shows that the novel inversion scheme better behaves whenever light wind regimes are in question.

ERS-1/2 wind scatterometers (WSC) data sets may contain cells in which two, instead of three, measurements are available. These data sets are called incomplete. Operational inversion procedures discard such data sets and therefore no wind field is estimated. This is very limiting in semi-closed seas such as the Mediterranean Sea. In this paper we propose a new inversion procedure capable to retrieving near surface wind fields from incomplete data sets. This procedure is an enhancement of an algorithm already proposed and tested by the authors. A set of comprehensive experiments are presented and discussed. It is shown that the inversion procedure gets to remarkable results even in presence of a large number of doublets.

In this paper we report the results of a study regarding the backscattering from wind-roughened water surfaces. The reference profile data has been deducted by an experiment held at the University of Heidelberg circular wave tank facility. The scattering theory is based on a fractal description of the surface and a combined use of the Kirchhoff approximation and the small perturbation method (SPM). The scattering results are tested versus the ones obtained via the periodic-surface moment method. The study shows the reliability of the novel approach.