Adaptive measurement and signal processing strategies associated with deterministic sea wave prediction

It has previously been recognised that it is possible to predict the shape of the sea surface (sea waves) in a deterministic fashion over periods of 20 to 30 seconds ahead in time. The resulting future sea wave information allows predictive control strategies for ship operation to be developed in various applications. For use with freely operating vessels remotely sensed sea surface data is required. The sample values arising from such measurements are highly nonuniformly distributed in space and this has considerable ramifications with respect to the signal processing requirements. An adaptive strategy is described for the measurement and data processing problem and a readily computable spectral measure of nonuniformity is employed to provide decision making guidelines within the adaptive strategy. Simulations of the remote sea surface measurement problem are performed in order to assess the effectiveness of an approximation technique in relation to the non-uniformity measure