S-Band Doppler Wave Radar System

In this paper, a novel shore-based S-band microwave Doppler coherent wave radar (Microwave Ocean Remote SEnsor (MORSE)) is designed to improve wave measurements. Marine radars, which operate in the X band, have been widely used for ocean monitoring because of their low cost, small size and flexibility. However, because of the non-coherent measurements and strong absorption of X-band radio waves by rain, these radar systems suffer considerable performance loss in moist weather. Furthermore, frequent calibrations to modify the modulation transfer function are required. To overcome these shortcomings, MORSE, which operates in the S band, was developed by Wuhan University. Because of the coherent measurements of this sensor, it is able to measure the radial velocity of water particles via the Doppler effect. Then the relation between the velocity spectrum and wave height spectrum can be used to obtain the wave height spectra. Finally, wave parameters are estimated from the wave height spectra by the spectrum moment method. Comparisons between MORSE and Waverider MKIII are conducted in this study, and the results, including the non-directional wave height spectra, significant wave height and average wave period, are calculated and displayed. The correlation coefficient of the significant wave height is larger than 0.9, whereas that of the average wave period is approximately 0.4, demonstrating the effectiveness of MORSE for the continuous monitoring of ocean areas with high accuracy.

[1]  J. Wright.  A new model for sea clutter , 1968 .

[2]  William J. Plant,et al.  Ocean wave‐radar modulation transfer functions from the West Coast Experiment , 1980 .

[3]  W. Plant,et al.  Microwave measurement of sea surface velocities from pier and aircraft , 1982 .

[4]  William J. Plant,et al.  Parametric dependence of ocean wave-radar modulation transfer functions , 1983 .

[5]  Wolfgang Rosenthal,et al.  A three-dimensional analysis of marine radar images for the determination of ocean wave directionality and surface currents , 1985 .

[6]  A. D. Rozenberg.  Measurement of the sea surface-radar signal modulation transfer fuction at 3-cm wavelength , 1990 .

[7]  William J. Plant,et al.  Evidence of Bragg scattering in microwave Doppler spectra of sea return , 1990 .

[8]  William J. Plant,et al.  Hydrodynamic modulation of short wind‐wave spectra by long waves and its measurement using microwave backscatter , 1994 .

[9]  E. M. Poulter,et al.  Microwave backscatter from the sea surface: Bragg scattering by short gravity waves , 1994 .

[10]  E. M. Poulter,et al.  S-Band FMCW Radar Measurements of Ocean Surface Dynamics , 1995 .

[11]  E. M. Poulter,et al.  Doppler radar measurements of wave groups and breaking waves , 1996 .

[12]  Murray J. Smith,et al.  Ocean surface currents obtained from microwave sea‐echo Doppler spectra , 1997 .

[13]  H. Herwig,et al.  Simultaneous acoustic and microwave backscattering from the sea surface , 1997 .

[14]  J. A. McGregor,et al.  S band Doppler radar measurements of bathymetry, wave energy fluxes, and dissipation across an offshore bar , 1998 .

[15]  Jörg Seemann,et al.  The near-surface current velocity determined from image sequences of the sea surface , 2001, IEEE Trans. Geosci. Remote. Sens..

[16]  Rune Gangeskar,et al.  Ocean current estimated from X-band radar sea surface, images , 2002, IEEE Trans. Geosci. Remote. Sens..

[17]  E. J. Bock,et al.  Observation of hydrodynamic modulation of gravity‐capillary waves by dominant gravity waves , 2003 .

[18]  Katrin Hessner,et al.  Inversion of Marine Radar Images for Surface Wave Analysis , 2004 .

[19]  Christophe Bourlier,et al.  Forward Propagation Modeling Above Gaussian Rough Surfaces by the Parabolic Shadowing Effect , 2006 .

[20]  Martin Gade,et al.  Relating Microwave Modulation to Microbreaking Observed in Infrared Imagery , 2008, IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Letters.

[21]  Jörg Seemann,et al.  Determination of Bathymetric and Current Maps by the Method DiSC Based on the Analysis of Nautical X-Band Radar Image Sequences of the Sea Surface (November 2007) , 2008, IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing.

[22]  W. Plant.  The Ocean Wave Height Variance Spectrum: Wavenumber Peak versus Frequency Peak , 2009 .

[23]  D B Trizna.  Comparisons of a fully coherent and coherent-on-receive marine radar for measurements of wave spectra and surface currents , 2010, OCEANS 2010 MTS/IEEE SEATTLE.

[24]  Yan Jin,et al.  Ocean wave directional spectrum measurement using microwave coherent radar with six antennas , 2012, IEICE Electron. Express.

[25]  Francesco Soldovieri,et al.  An X-Band Radar System for Bathymetry and Wave Field Analysis in a Harbour Area , 2015, Sensors.

[26]  Weimin Huang,et al.  An Algorithm for Surface Current Retrieval from X-band Marine Radar Images , 2015, Remote. Sens..

[27]  Jochen Horstmann,et al.  Significant Wave Height Measured by Coherent X-Band Radar , 2017, IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing.