Abstract
In this paper, a method for extracting wind parameters from rain-contaminated X-band nautical radar images is presented. The texture of the radar image is first generated based on spatial variability analysis. Through this process, the rain clutter in an image can be removed while the wave echoes are retained. The number of rain-contaminated pixels in each azimuthal direction of the texture is estimated, and this is used to determine the azimuthal directions in which the rain-contamination is negligible. Then, the original image data in these directions are selected for wind direction and speed retrieval using the modified intensity-level-selection-based wind algorithm. The proposed method is applied to shipborne radar data collected from the east Coast of Canada. The comparison of the radar results with anemometer data shows that the standard deviations of wind direction and speed using the rain mitigation technique can be reduced by about 14.5° and 1.3 m/s, respectively.
Highlights
Weather instruments such as anemometers have been widely installed on ships for the provision of sea surface wind information for navigation
The study of the effect of rain on microwave radar backscatter from the sea surface has gained significant attention, since rain may negatively influence the extraction of target information or sea surface parameters from the radar data
In order to test the proposed method, X-band nautical radar data collected from the East Coast of Canada by Defence Research and Development Canada (DRDC) are used
Summary
Weather instruments such as anemometers have been widely installed on ships for the provision of sea surface wind information for navigation. Anemometers may produce wind speed measurements with errors of 10% or more, depending on the nature of the ship’s motion and whether blockage due to the ship’s structure is a factor [1,2]. For these reasons, significant effort has been expended on wind measurement using X-band marine radar. It has been observed that sea surface radar backscatter is generally enhanced by the rain at X-band [6,7,8]
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