Abstract. We propose and test experimentally a new way of probing vertical shear of ocean surface currents by means of a single frequency VHF radar. The key idea is to use additional information provided by the so called secondary peaks in radar echo spectra which appear due to nonlinearity. Results of the field experiment carried out in the RhSne's delta show that the new method does enable one to probe the vertical shear with a reasonable accuracy and has potential for further development.
A simple automatic multipolarization technique for discrimination of main types of thin oil films (of thickness less than the radio wave skin depth) from natural ones is proposed. It is based on a new multipolarization parameter related to the ratio between the damping in the slick of specially normalized resonant and nonresonant signals calculated using the normalized radar cross‐section model proposed by Kudryavtsev et al. (2003a). The technique is tested on RADARSAT‐2 copolarization (VV/HH) synthetic aperture radar images of slicks of a priori known provenance (mineral oils, e.g., emulsion and crude oil, and plant oil served to model a natural slick) released during annual oil‐on‐water exercises in the North Sea in 2011 and 2012. It has been shown that the suggested multipolarization parameter gives new capabilities in interpreting slicks visible on synthetic aperture radar images while allowing discrimination between mineral oil and plant oil slicks.
[1] There exists no practical way of measuring vertical shear in the water just below the air/sea interface that contains information on air/water momentum fluxes. The paper is concerned with the validation of a recently proposed method of remote sensing of sea subsurface shear by means of a commonly used single-frequency HF radar based on the use of the second-order Bragg echo. To this end a dedicated field experiment was carried out off the French Mediterranean coast. In parallel with the HF radar probing, the independent simultaneous measurements of the subsurface shear profile were obtained by means of acoustic Doppler current profiler mounted on a floating platform, whose position was monitored by GPS. The comparison shows a fairly good agreement of the results (the discrepancy does not exceed 15%) and suggests a higher accuracy of the HF probing.
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