Construction of sea surface current vectors using a single HF radar: A theoretical study

Junqiang Shi; Xueen Chen; Xue Li; Ping Chen; Qiuli Shao

doi:10.1016/j.isci.2022.105722

Construction of sea surface current vectors using a single HF radar: A theoretical study

iScience. 2022 Dec 5;25(12):105722. doi: 10.1016/j.isci.2022.105722. eCollection 2022 Dec 22.

Authors

Junqiang Shi¹, Xueen Chen², Xue Li³, Ping Chen¹, Qiuli Shao¹

Affiliations

¹ Institute of Oceanographic Instrumentation, Qilu University of Technology (Shandong Academy of Sciences), Qingdao 266100, P. R. China.
² College of Oceanic and Atmospheric Sciences, Ocean University of China, Qingdao 266100, P. R. China.
³ China Research Institute of Radio Wave Propagation, China Electronics Technology Group Corporation, Qingdao 266108, P. R. China.

Abstract

A technique called the stream and potential function method (SPFM) is presented to retrieve the sea surface current vector field from the radial-component measurements of only one high-frequency (HF) radar. SPFM estimates the surface current vector field jointly based on hydrodynamic constraints and a two-dimensional (2D) ocean current model. The current vector field is assumed to comprise two parts: nondivergent vortex flow and irrotational divergent flow; this guarantees that both the stream function and the potential function are considered. Physically, SPFM is embedded in a more physically consistent hydrodynamic framework that enables the spatiotemporal distribution characteristics of the current vector field at the sea surface to be effectively captured by a single HF radar. The evaluation of SPFM with HYCOM surface current dataset verifies that this approach is more reliable than the stream function method (SFM).

Keywords: Applied sciences; Remote sensing; Surface sensing.