HF surface wave radar for oceanography - a review of activities in Germany

The remote sensing group of the University of Hamburg is working in the field of HF radar since 1980. For the start three CODAR systems have been purchased from NOAA/ERL (developed by D. Barrick´s NOAA group). Based on 16 years of experience a new system called WEllen RAdar (WERA) has been designed at the University of Hamburg in 1996. The new design aims to be as flexible as possible in order to allow easy adjustment to different requirements, i.e. working frequency, spatial resolution, and antenna configurations. The first part of this paper describes the technical solutions available to achieve resolution in range and azimuth. Modulation techniques for range resolution like Pulses and Frequency Modulation (FMCW) are compared, as well as Direction Finding and Beam Forming for azimuthal resolution. A short introduction to the algorithms is given. The second part discusses the hardware and software components which form a WERA and are now commercially available. The third part shows an example of a monitoring system bringing together HF radar remote sensed data and numerical models.