Towards Nonlinear Wave Reconstruction and Prediction From Synthetic Radar Images

The use of remotely wave sensing by a marine radar is increasingly needed to provide wave information for the sake of safety and operational effectiveness in many offshore activities. Reconstruction of radar images needs to be carried out since radar images are a poor representation of the sea surface elevation: effects like shadowing and tilt determine the backscattered intensity of the images. In [1], the sea state reconstruction and wave propagation to the radar has been tackled successfully for synthetic radar images of linear seas, except for a scaling in the vertical direction. The determination of the significant wave height from the shadowed images only has been described in [2]. This paper will summarize these methods, and provides the first results for the extension to nonlinear seas.