Marine & Environmental Sciences Faculty Articles
Very High-Frequency Radar Mapping of Surface Currents
ORCID
0000-0001-6519-1547
Document Type
Article
Publication Title
IEEE Journal of Oceanic Engineering
ISSN
0364-9059
Publication Date
4-2002
Keywords
ADCP, Coastal ocean circulation, Current profiles, Surface currents, VHF radar, vortices
Abstract
An ocean surface current radar (OSCR) in the very high frequency (VHF) mode was deployed in South Florida Ocean Measurement Center (SFOMC) during the summer of 1999. During this period, a 29-d continuous time series of vector surface currents was acquired starting on 9 July 1999 and ending 7 August 1999. Over a 20-min sample interval, the VHF radar mapped coastal ocean currents over a 7.5 km × 8 km domain with a horizontal resolution of 250 m at 700 grid points. A total of 2078 snapshots of the two-dimensional current vectors were acquired during this time series and of these samples, only 69 samples (3.3%) were missing from the time series. During this period, complex surface circulation patterns were observed that included coherent, submesoscale vortices with diameters of 2 to 3 km inshore of the Florida Current. Comparisons to subsurface measurements from moored and ship-board acoustic Doppler current profiles revealed regression slopes of close to unity with biases ranging from 4 to 8 cm s-1 between surface and subsurface measurements at 3 to 4 m beneath the surface. Correlation coefficients were 0.8 or above with phases of -10 to -20° suggestive of an anticyclonic veering of current with depth relative to the surface current. The radar-derived surface current field provided spatial context for an observational network using mooring-, ship- and autonomous underwater vehicle-sensor packages that were deployed at the SFOMC.
DOI
10.1109/JOE.2002.1002470
Volume
27
Issue
2
First Page
155
Last Page
169
Additional Comments
Ocean Modeling Program grant #: N00014-98-1-0818
NSUWorks Citation
Lynn K. Shay, Thomas M. Cook, Hartmut Peters, Arthur Mariano, Robert H. Weisberg, P. Edgar An, Alexander Soloviev, and Mark E. Luther. 2002. Very High-Frequency Radar Mapping of Surface Currents .IEEE Journal of Oceanic Engineering , (2) : 155 -169. https://nsuworks.nova.edu/occ_facarticles/651.
COinS
Comments
©2002 IEEE