Determination of Ocean Wave Propagation Direction Based on Azimuth Scanning Mode

The purpose of this letter is to show that the azimuth scanning mode of a synthetic aperture radar can be applied to deriving ocean wave spectra and determining the wave propagation direction for the first time, which reveals its enormous potential and great future in ocean observation. The improved Doppler beam sharpening imaging algorithm is used to produce a sequence of individual subimages of ocean waves in the same scan region from different aspect angles with a high revisit rate. These subimages have an inherent property that they are formed at different discretely delayed times. Therefore, wave propagation direction can be determined from a pair of wave images in different scans. Several different methods are applied to the real airborne radar wave data, including the methods of scan sum (taking the standard Fourier spectrum of the scan-summed image), spectral sum, spectral phase shift, and cross-correlation function of subimages. The processing results demonstrate the effectiveness of the algorithms.