Derivation Of Sea Surface Current Fields Using Tandem-X Pursuit Monostatic Mode Data

The TerraSAR-X and TanDEM-X (TSX/TDX) satellites adopt the HELIX operation manner of formatted flight to form a mono-rail dual antenna system for earth observation. In the monostatic mode, TSX/TDX operates independently, and the time interval for the observation over the same region is relatively short. Therefore, using TSX and TDX monostatic mode data, we can apply the maximum cross-correlation (MCC) method to extract the sea surface current fields (SSC), which can minimize the temporal de-correlation and improve the retrieval accuracy. In this paper, we presented a case study to demonstrate the derivation of sea surface current fields in high spatial resolution using this unique TSX/TDX configuration.