Monitoring hurricanes over the ocean with wide swath SAR

One of the most unexpected new applications for wide swath synthetic apertu re radar (SAR) is the monitoring of atmospheric expressions of storms over the ocean. SAR has an advantage over many sensors because it can pass throu gh clouds and take images at any time of day. However, since SAR's detectio n capability is based on the modulation of the sea surface wind field, it c an only observe storms over water. Hurricanes and other mesoscale storms ar e easily detected with existing observations, but SAR can contribute fine-r esolution low-level information that cannot be seen below the cloud deck wi th Other sensors. Using Radarsat-1, we have imaged three hurricanes during the 1998 season. Two SAR images of Hurricane Bonnie separated by 1 day are presented, and observations from the SAR data are discussed.