Continuous monitoring of the wind over vast ocean areas by airborne and satellite microwave scatterometers and reflectometers is essential for weather forecasting. The basic idea of the techniques relies on the assumption that the ocean surface normalized radar cross section (NRCS) (for both mono-and bi-static geometries) is correlated with the local surface wind vector.

LuTan-1 (referred as LT-1) is an innovative spaceborne Earth observation mission containing two satellites, feature each an advanced full polarimetric L-band SAR system.