LONG-TERM GOALS The long-term goal of this research effort is to investigate the possibility of obtaining quantitative information about the near-surface wind field and perhaps other parameters that characterize the Marine Atmospheric Boundary Layer (MABL) from an analysis of Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) imagery. Because of its potential for yielding such information in the form of high-resolution imagery, this application of SAR, especially in coastal waters, would represent a significant

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... ance over most scatterometer and passive microwave sensors that yield only coarse-resolution estimates of the wind field. OBJECTIVES Based on the results of effort over the past several years, we now believe that the possibility of generating high-resolution wind maps from SAR has been demonstrated. Our wind-map generation procedure has been automated so that high-resolution wind maps can be obtained from a SAR image within about 30 minutes after the raw image file is received at JHU/APL. The immediate objective of work on the present grant is to support the ONR-sponsored Coupled Boundary Layer Air-Sea Transfer (CBLAST) Program field experiments by producing SAR wind maps over the experimental area south of Martha's Vineyard and with daily AVHRR sea-surface temperature (SST) imagery. This imagery provides valuable estimates of the spatial behavior of features near the air-sea interface. Furthermore, comparison between the SAR-derived wind predictions and in situ and airborne data collected during the CBLAST field experiments allows us to further refine our wind-mapping algorithms. -1-