Internal solitary wave propagation observed by tandem satellites

Internal solitary waves (ISWs) are observed 2 times within 30 min in synthetic aperture radar (SAR) image pairs from the Envisat and ERS-2 tandem satellites. Three pairs of SAR images were acquired in the South China Sea (SCS) in April 2007, August 2008, and March 2009, and 13 ISWs were tracked between the image pair in an ArcGIS environment. The phase speeds of these ISWs are calculated from their spatial displacement and time interval. The resultant ISW speeds agree well with the theoretical values estimated from the Sturm-Louisville equation using local bathymetric and monthly climatology ocean stratification data. This technique reveals the spatial variation in the ISWs speed in the water depth between 100 and 4000 m in the SCS. The study shows that ISWs speed is mainly affected by bottom topography and generally decreases from deep to shallow water from east to west and from south to north.