Estimation of ocean wave heights from temporal sequences of X-Band marine radar images

Marine radars scan the water surface at grazing incidence with HH polarization. Unlike other remote sensing systems, marine radars cover smaller areas, but these sensors are able to obtain short-term temporal information about wave fields using consecutive antenna rotations. This work deals with a method to estimate the significant wave height from sea clutter image time series. This method is based on similar techniques developed for Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) systems. The basic idea is the significant wave height is linearly dependent on the root square of the signal-noise ratio, where the signal is assumed as the radar analysis estimation of the wave spectral energy and the noise is computed as the energy due to the sea surface roughness.