High-Resolution Spectral Estimation of HF Radar Data for Current Measurement Applications

Abstract

his paper presents a comparative study of high-resolution methods for high-frequency radar current mapping. A z-domain transformation and auxiliary z-domain manipulation of the autoregressive method is proposed for this comparison. A Weibull distribution test is recommended to justify the Rayleigh distribution of the sea clutter for quality control. Upon the power spectrum estimation, a conventional centroid method and a new symmetric-peak-sum method for the identification of current Doppler shift are proposed as another comparison. HF radar data were collected over the period from November 2012 to August 2013 at Placentia Bay, Newfoundland, Canada, and were compared with measurements from an acoustic Doppler current meter. This comparison is used to study the utility of high-resolution spectrum estimation and Bragg identification methods for surface current mapping. Results show promising use of these methods in different current scenarios and suggest combined applications to improve accuracy.