ESTIMATING AND FUSING OPTICAL FLOW, GEOSTROPHIC CURRENTS AND SEA SURFACE WIND IN THE WATERS AROUND KISH ISLAND

Abstract. The aim of this study is calculation of sea surface currents (SSCs) which are estimated from satellite data sets and processed with the variance component estimation (VCE) algorithm to check role of each data set, in fused surface currents (FSCs). The satellite data used in this study are sea surface temperature (SST), satellite altimetry data and sea surface wind (SSW) that plays the important role to make the SSCs and is measured by Ascat satellite. We use optical flow (OF) method (Horn-Schunck algorithm) to extract sea surface movements from sequential SST imageries; in addition, geostrophic currents (GCs) are estimated by satellite altimetry data like sea surface height (SSH). Combining these data sets, has its pros and cons, the OF results are so dense and precise due to high spatial resolution of MODIS data (SST), but sometimes cloud covering over the sea, does not allow the MODIS sensor to measure the SST. In contrast the SST data, the altimetry data have poor spatial resolution and the GCs are not able to determine small scale SSCs. The VCE algorithm shows variances of our data sets and it can be shown their correlations with themselves and with the FSCs. We also calculate angular differences between FSCs and OF, GCs and SSW, and plot distributions of these angular differences. We discover that, the OF and SSW are homolographic, but OF and GCs are accordant to each other.