HF Surface Wave Radar: Improving Performance and Extending Capabilities

Dear Colleagues,

HF radars are now widely used in coastal observing systems to monitor surface currents, from the coast to over 100 km offshore. Measurements of ocean waves and inferred winds have also been carried out with these systems, although these are not routinely available from most operational systems. The radar echoes containing the desired information must compete with external noise, which may originate from natural or anthropogenic sources, and unwanted echoes, including echoes from ships and plasma irregularities in the ionosphere. In some parts of the world, the performance of these systems is also being threatened by the push for offshore wind energy, because wind turbines impose a broad spectral modulation on the radar signals and thereby corrupt oceanographic and meteorological measurements.

Some of the factors that impose limits to radar performance are beyond our control, but others may be self-inflicted. For instance, the radar technology being used may be inappropriate in its design or its deployment, the quality of the radar data obtained may be degraded by signal treatment schemes that are suboptimum, and the methods used to extract MetOcean data from the inevitably noisy sea echo signatures may not be sufficiently robust.

We hope that some of these limitations will be explored and, where possible, solutions offered, in papers submitted to this Special Issue. These could include new radar technologies and deployment principles, new signal processing approaches, and new inverse methods. We also invite papers that review existing techniques that address some of these issues but are not yet widely applied. Beyond these advances, we would be delighted to receive descriptions of other problems encountered by radar users that have limited robust and accurate data delivery, to suggest future research directions.

Prof. Dr. Lucy Wyatt
Prof. Dr. Stuart Anderson
Guest Editors

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