X-Band Radar as a Tool to Determine Spectral and Single Wave Properties

Author(s):  
Konstanze Reichert ◽  
Katrin Hessner ◽  
Jens Dannenberg ◽  
Ina Traenkmann

The Wave Monitoring System WaMoS II was developed for real time measurements of directional ocean waves spectra to monitor the sea state from fixed platforms in deep water or coastal areas as well as from moving vessels. The system is based on a standard marine X-Band radar used for navigation and ship traffic control. WaMoS II digitises the analogous radar signal and analyses the sea clutter information to obtain directional wave spectra from the sea surface in real time even under harsh weather conditions and during night. Spectral sea state parameters such as significant wave height, peak wave period and peak wave direction both for wind sea and swell are derived. Within the EU funded project ‘MaxWave’ and the German project ‘SinSee’ new algorithms were developed to determine sea surface elevation maps from radar images which are used to investigate the spatial and temporal evolution of single waves simultaneously. In this paper a short overview describes the calculation of surface elevation maps and the detection of individual waves. Considering two case studies, the results of spatial single wave detection and corresponding temporal single wave properties are compared and discussed. Individual wave parameters derived from radar images are compared to individual waves measured by a buoy. An application of the method to characterise extreme sea states is discussed.

2008 ◽  
Vol 19 ◽  
pp. 83-86 ◽  
Author(s):  
F. Serafino ◽  
C. Lugni ◽  
F. Soldovieri

Abstract. The paper deals with the feasibility study of the sea state monitoring starting from X-band radar images. The exploitation of radar images allows to achieve a global vision of the sea state compared to the local vision given by the usual sensors as the buoys. The processing approach is based on the formulation of problem as an inverse one where starting from the electromagnetic field backscattered by the sea surface, the information about the sea state are retrieved. The reliability of the inversion procedure is shown by processing synthetic and experimental data where particular attention is focussed to the determination of the sea current and speed of the vessel.


Author(s):  
Céline Drouet ◽  
Nicolas Cellier ◽  
Jérémie Raymond ◽  
Denis Martigny

In-service monitoring can help to increase safety of ships especially regarding the fatigue assessment. For this purpose, it is compulsory to know the environmental conditions encountered: wind, but also the full directional wave spectrum. During the EU TULCS project, a full scale measurements campaign has been conducted onboard the CMA-CGM 13200 TEU container ship Rigoletto. She has been instrumented to measure deformation of the ship as well as the sea state encountered during its trip. This paper will focus on the sea state estimation. Three systems have been installed to estimate the sea state encountered by the Rigoletto: An X-band radar from Ocean Waves with WAMOS® system and two altimetric wave radars from RADAC®. Nevertheless, the measured significant wave height can be disturbed by several external elements like bow waves, sprays, sea surface ripples, etc… Furthermore, ship motions are also measured and can provide another estimation of the significant wave height using a specific algorithm developed by DCNS Research for the TULCS project. As all those estimations are inherently different, it is necessary to make a fusion of those data to provide a single estimation (“best estimate”) of the significant wave height. This paper will present the data fusion process developed for TULCS and show some first validation results.


Author(s):  
A. P. Wijaya

The use of remotely wave sensing by a marine radar is increasingly needed to provide wave information for the sake of safety and operational effectiveness in many offshore activities. Reconstruction of radar images needs to be carried out since radar images are a poor representation of the sea surface elevation: effects like shadowing and tilt determine the backscattered intensity of the images. In [1], the sea state reconstruction and wave propagation to the radar has been tackled successfully for synthetic radar images of linear seas, except for a scaling in the vertical direction. The determination of the significant wave height from the shadowed images only has been described in [2]. This paper will summarize these methods, and provides the first results for the extension to nonlinear seas.


Author(s):  
S. Lehner ◽  
J. Schulz-Stellenfleth ◽  
Thomas Ko¨nig ◽  
X. Li

For the design of ships as well as for the investigation of ship accidents it is important to have knowledge about both the two dimensional spectral wave properties as well as extreme value statistics of ocean waves. Although numerical wave models have reached a high level of accuracy, they still have weaknesses with respect to the details of the 2-D wave spectrum. Furthermore standard models like WAM provide estimates of the 2-D wave spectrum, i.e., second order sea state statistics and therefore lack information on individual wave properties and the occurrence of extreme events. In this study the potential of global Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) wave mode data acquired by the European satellites ERS-2 and ENVISAT to investigate ship accidents is discussed and compared to altimeter data and ECMWF model results. These data are acquired independent of light and weather conditions on a global scale. A historic data set of ERS-2 wave mode data acquired between 1998 and 2000 is co-located with accidents which occurred during that time. ENVISAT ASAR wave mode data acquired since 2002 are considered, too. Different ocean wave parameters like significant wave height and wave periods are derived from the SAR data. The potential role of the respective wave conditions for some recent accident is discussed in detail. This includes in particular the analysis of cross sea conditions, groupiness and extreme events.


2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (11) ◽  
pp. 1736
Author(s):  
Zhongqing Cao ◽  
Lixin Guo ◽  
Shifeng Kang ◽  
Xianhai Cheng ◽  
Qingliang Li ◽  
...  

In ground-based microwave radiometer remote sensing, low-elevation-angle (−3°~3°) radiation data are often discarded because they are considered to be of little value and are often difficult to model due to the complicated mechanism. Based on the observed X-band horizontal polarization low elevation angle microwave radiation data and the meteorological data at the same time, this study investigated the generation mechanism of low elevation angle brightness temperature (LEATB) and its relationship with meteorological data, i.e., temperature, humidity, and wind speed, under low sea state. As a result, one could find that the LEATB was sensitive to the atmosphere at the elevation angle between 1° to 3°, and a diurnal variation of the LEATB reached up to 10 K. This study also found a linear relationship between the LEATB and sea surface wind speed under low sea state at an elevation range from −3° to 0°, i.e., the brightness temperature decreased as the wind speed increased, which was inconsistent with the observations at the elevation angle from −10° to −5°. The variation of the LEATB difference according to the change in the over-the-horizon detection capability (OTHDC) of the shipborne microwave radar was examined to identify the reason for this phenomenon theoretically. The results showed that the LEATB difference was significantly influenced by a change in the OTHDC. Further, this study examined a remote sensing method to extract the sea surface wind speed data from experimental LEATB data under low sea state. The results demonstrated that the X-band horizontal polarization LEATBs were useful to retrieve the sea surface wind speed data at a reasonable accuracy—the root mean square error of 0.02408 m/s. Overall, this study proved the promising potential of the LEATB data for retrieving temperature profiles, humidity profiles, sea surface winds, and the OTHDC.


Author(s):  
Francesco Serafino ◽  
Claudio Lugni ◽  
Francesco Soldovieri

This work deals with the sea state monitoring starting from marine radar images collected on a moving ship. For such a topic, one of the key factors affecting the reliability of the reconstruction procedure is the determination of the equivalent surface current that also accounts for the speed of the moving ship. Here, we propose a method able to evaluate also high values of the sea surface current. The reliability of the proposed procedure is shown by a numerical analysis with synthetic data. Finally, we present some preliminary results with measurements collected on a moving ship.


2015 ◽  
Vol 101 ◽  
pp. 244-253 ◽  
Author(s):  
S. Salcedo-Sanz ◽  
J.C. Nieto Borge ◽  
L. Carro-Calvo ◽  
L. Cuadra ◽  
K. Hessner ◽  
...  

2018 ◽  
Vol 10 (12) ◽  
pp. 1919 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pavel Chernyshov ◽  
Teodor Vrecica ◽  
Yaron Toledo

A new method to invert X-band radar images for linear shoaling conditions is proposed. The commonly used approach for this type of inverse problems is the Fourier transform. Unlike in deep water conditions, in the shoaling region, waves are modulated both in terms of wavelength and amplitude. However, Fourier analysis assumes spacial and temporal periodicity, and homogeneity limiting its applicability to this region. In order to overcome these limitations, a wavelet based technique is developed. The proposed technique treats every spatial radar image within the time sequence individually, so no information on the dispersion relation is required. For validation purposes, surface elevation range-time shoaling realizations based on the mild slope equation are prepared. A radar imaging model including tilt and shadowing modulations, speckle noise, and the radar equation is applied to these realizations to provide modeled grazing incidence radar images. The inversion process starts with the application of the continuous wavelet transform independently for each spacial image. The procedure continues with employing a successive range independent modulation transfer function to the wavelet spectra in the wavenumber domain. Then, after a phase shift correction, an inverse continuous wavelet transform is applied. The procedure is finalized by a calibration of the retrieved maps. After the calibration, a thorough comparison between the original and the reconstructed surface elevations is performed. It shows high efficiency of the proposed method in treating wave number and amplitude modulated signals, as well as in addressing local phase shifts due to tilt modulation and noise contamination. The new inversion method is proven to have high accuracy in inhomogeneous conditions. It shows high potential to be implemented for individual wave reconstruction using real aperture radars.


2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Dion Häfner ◽  
Johannes Gemmrich ◽  
Markus Jochum

AbstractRogue waves are dangerous ocean waves at least twice as high as the surrounding waves. Despite an abundance of studies conducting simulations or wave tank experiments, there is so far no reliable forecast for them. In this study, we use data mining and interpretable machine learning to analyze large amounts of observational data instead (more than 1 billion waves). This reveals how rogue wave occurrence depends on the sea state. We find that traditionally favored parameters such as surface elevation kurtosis, steepness, and Benjamin–Feir index are weak predictors for real-world rogue wave risk. In the studied regime, kurtosis is only informative within a single wave group, and is not useful for forecasting. Instead, crest-trough correlation is the dominating parameter in all studied conditions, water depths, and locations, explaining about a factor of 10 in rogue wave risk variation. For rogue crests, where bandwidth effects are unimportant, we find that skewness, steepness, and Ursell number are the strongest predictors, in line with second-order theory. Our results suggest that linear superposition in bandwidth-limited seas is the main pathway to “everyday” rogue waves, with nonlinear contributions providing a minor correction. This casts some doubt whether the common rogue wave definition as any wave exceeding a certain height threshold is meaningful in practice.


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