An improved method to estimate the Doppler spectrum centroid of microwave radar

The paper proposes an improved method which is called Successive Approximation (SA) method, to enable us to construct high efficient routines to estimate the Doppler spectrum centroid for microwave Doppler radar. This method is described in details. In addition to the particular description of the proposed method, several commonly used methods for estimating the Doppler spectrum centroid in frequency domain are also compared by observing their behavior with simulated signals. The responses of these methods to various ocean states, including high and low ocean states, are investigated as well. The proposed method exhibits better statistical properties and more accurate estimations in both ocean states. These estimation results are fundamental quantities required for obtaining remotely sensing wave parameters such as significant wave height and effective wave period in microwave radar.