Significant Wave Height Measured by Coherent X-Band Radar

Significant wave height is one of the most important parameters for characterizing ocean waves and essential for coastal protection, shipping, as well as off shore industry operations. Within this paper, a robust method is introduced for retrieving significant wave heights from Doppler speed measurements acquired with a coherent-on-receive marine radar. The Doppler velocity is caused by the surface scattering in the line of site of the radar. To a huge extent its periodic component is induced by the orbital motions associated with surface waves. The proposed methodology is based on linear wave theory, accounts for projection effects caused by the fixed antenna look direction, and was applied to a coherent-on-receive radar operating at X-band with vertical polarization in transmit and receive. To show the overall performance of the method, a data set consisting of approximately 100 days of radar measurements was analyzed and used to retrieve significant wave heights. Comparisons to wave measurements collected by a wave rider buoy resulted in a root-mean-square (rms) error of 0.21 m and a bias of 0 m without any calibration parameters needed. To further improve the accuracy of significant wave height, a calibration factor needs to be accounted for, which improves the rms error to 0.15 m with a negligible bias of -0.01 m.