Comments on "On the synthetic aperture radar imaging of ocean surface waves"

A. v. Ivanov ( 1 ) presents theoretical and experimental evi- dence for the often-stated view that azimuthal focus Settings for optimum imaging of ocean waves by synthetic aperture radar depend on the azimuthal component of the wave's phase speed, His results do not agree with those of Jain (2), 131, since he predicts focus to depend on one-half the phase speed, while Jain finds dependence on the full phase speed. It has been sug- gested, however, by Hasselmann (4 1 and Alpers et al. (5 1 that these azimuthal focus settings do not depend on the phase speed of the wave at all. Rather they result from the line-of- sight orbital acceleration of the surface. Below I will show that Ivanov's theoretical result is incorrect and occurs only from a misapplication of the two-scale model. Up to (4) of the Ivanov paper, the development is rather standard. Having here obtained a relationship -between image intensity and the spatial spectral density of the ripples