Estimating ocean wave height is vital for coastal activities. Herein, we propose a method for the estimation of wave height using a phase time series of the frequency-modulated continuous-wave (FMCW) millimeter-wave (MMW) radar. We simulated a one-dimensional wavy ocean surface under different wind speeds and the electromagnetic echo of MMW radar on the ocean surface. The simulation results show that the unwrapping phase time series-based wave heights are highly consistent with the actual wave heights. This shows that the phase time series of the FMCW MMW radar is effective for estimating wave height, and the FMCW MMW radar can be used to monitor ocean states.

High-frequency (HF) radars are routinely used for remotely sensing ocean surface currents. However, the performance of the most widely used direction-finding HF radar is degraded due to the effect of the inevitable deviations of actual antenna pattern on the direction of arrival (DOA) estimation. In this paper, we quantify the DOA estimation error resulting from the deviation of the actual antenna pattern from the ideal one. Theoretical analysis and field experiment results suggest that the ratio of the deviations for the two loops dominates the DOA estimation error. Thus, eliminating the effect of the antenna pattern deviations on DOA estimation error is transformed into eliminating the effect of this ratio. From this, a calibration method based on the time-averaged local spatial coverage rate (TLSCR) is proposed to reduce the effect of the antenna pattern deviations on current extraction, which uses the ideal antenna pattern to estimate the DOA of the echoes. To validate this proposed calibration method, we assess the radar-derived radial velocities by comparing with in situ observations. The comparison results indicate that the proposed TLSCR calibration method can effectively reduce the DOA estimation error and improve the performance of the direction-finding HF radar in current observation.

High-frequency (HF) radar receives the sea echo backscattered from the fluctuating ocean surface to remotely sense ocean surface currents over a large area with a high space-time resolution. To advance our understanding on this technology, we carried out an experiment for verifying the performance of ocean state monitoring and analyzing radar, model S (OSMAR-S) in ocean surface current measurement. The hourly radial currents measured by this radar system show a good agreement with acoustic Doppler current profilers (ADCPs) with correlation coefficients ranging in 0.40–0.93 and root-mean-square-error (rmse) values in 0.11–0.18 m/s. The u/v components of the radar-derived vector currents show a similar deviation from the ADCPs with correlation coefficients varying from 0.56 to 0.93 and rmse values varying in 0.13–0.18 m/s. Also, the bearing offset of this radar system in current extraction is in the range from $-$11$^{\circ }$to 18$^{\circ }$. In consideration of the fact that the ideal antenna pattern was used in determining the bearing of the radials, we assume the main source resulting in the bearing offset is the antenna pattern distortion. Thus, a quantitative relation between the antenna pattern distortion factor and the bearing offset has been deduced. With this relation, we estimated the bearing error in the moorings’ bearing with the aid of the current information recorded by ADCPs. As expected, the result indicates that the antenna pattern distortion dominates the error of the bearing determination.

Wind spreading functions (WSF) are crucial for high-frequency radar (HFR) wind-direction inversion. The popular half-angle cosine WSF always fails to describe observed HFR Doppler spectra and tends to provide almost fixed relative angle estimations. In this letter, analysis of the data from a broad-beam HFR radar, deployed on the Taiwan Strait's west coast, shows that a modified WSF (based on the cosine WSF) has a better wind-direction estimation performance. The modified WSF fits average Bragg ratios of 15-day data well with the aid of data from buoys. The data of the next 13 days are used to test the modified WSF. The wind direction estimated by the modified WSF has an advantage when Bragg ratios have adequate average processing, and directions of arrival are around the upwind or downwind direction. The root mean square error of the modified WSF wind-direction estimate is 32.59° for the entire observation, decreasing to 14.18° when a significant wave height is between 1 and 2 m.