Spaceborne Synthetic Aperture Radar for Oceanography

The book originates from a symposium held at the Applied Physics Laboratory of the Johns Hopkins University in March 1980. The purpose of the symposium was to review the results to date of investigations related to the SEASAT SAR (synthetic aperture radar) experiment and, to quote from the book's foreword, ‘to explore the potential’ of such satellite‐borne imaging radars for oceanography. The book contains 13 papers; these are grouped into chapters according to the various phenomena sensed by the SAR; namely, winds (or surface stress), waves, and circulation patterns. The book is held together by an introduction to SAR principles and the SEASAT mission (by Beal) and concludes with a panel discussion and a collection of SAR imagery obtained over the western North Atlantic during the abbreviated lifetime of the SEASAT mission (June—October 1978). (This imagery, composited from four optically processed 25 km subswaths, comes as a bit of a disappointment after the 40‐km square digitally processed images that grace as frontispieces the several chapters of the volume).