Application of radial and elliptical surface current measurements to better resolve coastal features

摘要

The ephemeral nature of sea breeze makes it a challenging phenomenon to study. The sea breeze is an important wind resource that could potentially be harnessed to enhance coastal wind energy development. It is also an important force in coastal ocean dynamics and warrants further study. It would be convenient and inexpensive to study the sea breeze with HF radar, over broad spatial and temporal scales, if it can only be adequately differentiated from other stronger signals and noise. We seek to isolate the sea breeze signals in ocean surface currents using bistatic HF radar. Bistatic measurements can help increase the spatial resolution of sampling and help resolve features like the effects of sea breeze on the sea surface. The elliptical and radial data were consistently in statistical agreement with each other. This is the case across all analyses performed. This indicates that the elliptical data produced by the bistatic systems validates the radial data, which had been previously validated by drifter data. In turn, elliptical data has been shown to be a reliable measure of surface current velocity. Elliptical data continues to be valuable for increasing surface current velocity measurement density. More sophisticated statistical tests may reveal differences between radial and elliptical measurements. An important next step would be determining the finest spatial and temporal resolution available with combined elliptical and radial data, and then changing the spatial and temporal averaging radii in the SeaSonde software. This could potentially reveal finer features that are currently lost in averaging.