Relative Atmospheric Wind Speed Measurement Based on Time-Delay D-InSAR

Accurate wind speed measurement is of great significance for meteorological analysis, weather forecasting and climate change research. Spaceborne differential interferometric synthetic aperture radar (D-InSAR), with its all-day, all-weather, high-resolution observation capabilities, has shown potential for indirectly measuring wind speed by monitoring changes in atmospheric water vapor. This paper proposes a method for relative atmospheric wind speed measurement based on time-delay D-InSAR. The principle involves using a distributed satellites monostatic D-InSAR system to acquire atmospheric differential interferograms of the same region within a short time interval. By using image thresholding to identify the displacement of hotspots, we can infer the average relative wind speed from the movement of water vapor clusters. The results demonstrate that D-InSAR can accurately measure the average wind speed, which is a cumulative effect across various altitude layers. The measured wind speed has an average relative error of 0.07 and a root mean square error of 1.02 m/s when compared to the theoretical wind speed. This validates the feasibility of using D-InSAR for wind speed measurement. In the future, this technology could be further extended to 3-D wind speed measurement and enhance accuracy by improving the algorithm, which will offer a new approach for atmospheric wind speed monitoring.