An Algorithm for Ocean Current Inversion from X-Band Marine Radar Images

An algorithm for extracting sea surface current information from X-band nautical radar image sequences is presented in this paper. The angular frequencies corresponding to the wave numbers are first extracted from the radar image sequence, and then the Doppler shifts corresponding to every wave numbers are calculated. The Doppler shifts corresponding to wavevectors symmetric with respect to the origin of the wave number plane are used to estimate current speed and direction. Test using simulated data shows the root mean square error (RMSE) of current speed is 0.13 m/s and that of current direction is 1.4°. The results illustrate that the method is feasible with comparable accuracy to existing methods.