Results and analysis of surface current based on UHF radar

Ultra high frequency(UHF) radar has the characteristics of high range resolution and low-power, which can extract information of both capillary wave and gravity wave with the wavelength between high frequency and microwave. It is possible to obtain precise monitoring of the coastal ocean dynamics parameters by UHF radar, though the offshore topography and ocean surface current are complex.UHF radar is different from HF radar, since the first-order peak and second-order spectrum are indistinguishable in the sea echo spectrum. It is difficult to extract first-order peak, therefore, multiple signal classification algorithm (MUSIC)is unavailable and digital beam-forming(DBF) is used in extracting the radial velocity. After a month, the radar and buoy datais highly correlated with a coefficient of 0.88, however, the root mean square error is large.The results show that the velocity of the ocean surface is influenced not only by the tidal effect and the rotationof the earth, but also by the local wind speed.