CoAuthors

Frederic Nouguier (Ifremer, France); Bertrand Chapron (Ifremer, France); Paco Lopez Dekker (Delft University of Technology, Netherlands)

Earth Explorer 10 mission Harmony consists of two satellites that fly in formation with Sentinel-1. It will operate as a multistatic radar in which Sentinel-1 transmits signals and all three satellites receive signals from different lines-of-sight. To prepare for Harmony and other possible future bistatic missions, transforms are derived to map the ocean-wave spectrum into bistatic synthetic aperture radar (SAR) spectra. The SAR mapping follows the standard derivation using the multi-dimensional characteristic function, but with adjustments for the modulation transfer functions compared to the monostatic case. A benefit of having additional receivers for wave-spectra estimation is that the three lines-of-sight enables to capture a larger fraction of the wave spectrum. In this study we will compare Harmony's bistatic ocean-wave observations to those of the Chinese-French Oceanography Satellite (CFOSat), the monostatic observations of Sentinel-1, the near-nadir altimetry observations of a swath altimeter (Sentinel-3 Next Generation Topography) and nadir altimeters (Sentinel-6) in terms of spectral coverage, revisit time and wave-field continuity.