Monitoring Sea Surface Currents Based on China GF-4 Multispectral Data

Abstract

The seawater tracing index that characterizes the sea surface feature can be calculated using the optimal band combination of China GF-4 high-resolution multispectral data, and the distribution of sea surface currents can be retrieved from the sequential band combination data. In this paper, the methods of monitoring sea surface currents are presented in detail by processing multispectral remote sensing images generated by China GF-4 Earth Observation satellite. The sea surface currents obtained from GF-4 imagery data are compared with the sea surface currents derived from FES2014 global ocean tide model, providing a validation of the proposed methods.

Keywords:

• FES2014 tide model
• GF-4 satellite
• maximum cross-correlation
• optical flow algorithm
• remote sensing
• sea surface currents