Title: Evaluating Accuracy of Surface Current Vectors Measured by Bistatic HF Ocean Radar
Abstract: High-frequency (HF) ocean radar is a kind of Doppler radar that can monitor ocean surface conditions, such as surface current vectors, wind direction, and ocean waves, by analyzing the frequency of backscattered echoes from the ocean surface. With HF ocean radar, it is possible to continuously observe from land a large area of ocean with less labor, while conventional methods using ships and mooring buoys can only measure at some particular points on the ocean. Therefore, the importance of HF ocean radar is increasing in various fields such as oceanography, coastal engineering, and fishery. Conventional HF ocean radar is categorized as a monostatic radar whose transmitter and receiver are located in the same place. In the case of bistatic radar, a receiver is located apart from the transmitter. In general, the sensitivity of bistatic radar is inferior in comparison with conventional monostatic radar, and its observation range tends to be smaller. Therefore, bistatic HF ocean radar has drawn little attention, and there have been few cases where surface current measurement using bistatic HF ocean radar were actually done. In bistatic radar, however, multiple receivers can be stationed for a transmitter, which means that it is easy to construct a multiple-Doppler radar network with fewer transmitters than used in monostatic radar. Having fewer transmitters leads to some remarkable advantages such as lower probability of interference between radars, reduced construction costs, and more efficient use of frequency resources. Another advantage of bistatic radar is that the aperture of either transmitting or receiving antenna can be smaller because it is not necessary for both antennas to produce a narrow beam. Based on these characteristics of bistatic radar, it is expected that bistatic HF ocean radar will be a useful technique to construct a large-scale observation network using many HF ocean radars. In this paper, we report the results of the simultaneous observation of ocean surface currents using a bistatic HF radar system and drifting buoys performed in the south part of the East China Sea in August 2004 in order to evaluate the accuracy of the surface current vectors measured by the bistatic HF ocean radar developed by the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT).
Publication Year: 2007
Publication Date: 2007-01-01
Language: en
Type: article
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