Feasibility of Extracting Sea Surface Current by Onboard HF-SAR

On the requirement of extracting sea surface current information by a single station, we try to apply synthetic aperture technique to HF surface wave radar, present the new concept of HF surface wave SAR (HF-SAR), and consider the feasibility of extracting sea surface current by HF-SAR in this paper. Firstly the composition and implementation aspects are described, then system model and velocity estimation algorithm are designed, and finally simulation model to extract surface current is implemented on a single resolution cell. Additive complex Gaussian noise is included in the model of SAR echo signals. Simulation results show that by properly choosing the size of a resolution cell in azimuth direction, and estimating Doppler centroid and Doppler rate from azimuth echoes, the velocity estimation of surface current is derived, and the precision is enough to meet the requirements. It indicates that HF-SAR is theoretically feasible to be used in sea surface current extraction