A qualitative study of internal wave ship wakes: Dependence on environmental conditions and experimental parameters

Abstract

For the past several years the UK-US Radar Ocean Imaging Program has conducted a series of field experiments with the primary purpose of gathering real aperture radar (RAR) imagery at low grazing angle of ship-generated internal wave (IW) wakes. The first observations with RAR`s were made in the 1989 Loch Linnhe experiment where it was observed that radar images at low grazing angles (LGA) of approximately six degrees had significantly higher modulation levels than SAR images made at higher grazing angles of 35 - 65 degrees. These initial observations have led to several more experiments designed to verify the phenomenon and to test its dependence on experimental and environmental conditions. A parallel effort began to develop theoretical models of the LGA imaging process. Through this series of experiments we have developed an extensive database of radar imagery and supporting environmental data. The objective of this report is twofold: (1) To describe the database and the associated space of parameters. We will look at the coverage of the parameter space within the database and at areas which should be covered. (2) To take an initial look at the dependence of qualitative modulation strength on the experimental and environmental parameters. This firstmore » look will indicate the strongest dependencies which can then be studied in more detail. Section 2 describes the experimental database and Section 3 discusses the parameter space, image quality, and their relationships based on the images in the database. In Section 4 we summarize our conclusions and make recommendations for both future analyses and experiments.« less