[enriquto]

thanks for the clarification! I'm just used to looking to the images without thinking too much about the water.

I've never seen "close to nadir" radar images... wouldn't the ground fold over itself?

[m2fkxy]

Nadir-SAR would look very confusing, full of ambiguities, and probably unexploitable since the ranging part of RADAR would not be able to distinguish the left returns from the right returns -- that's why SAR is side-looking.

even with a strictly side-looking geometry, images collected closer to nadir (steep/low incidence) start exhibiting some artifacts such as nadir returns [1].

[1] https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Example-of-nadir-echo-in...