Application of differential OMEGAto remote ocean environment sensing

Application of Differential OMEGA to measurement of position and velocity of automatic at-sea oceanographic data collection devices is addressed. For example, choice of a system to provide position and velocity information is conditioned on several factors including simplicity of equipment operation, reasonable per-unit cost and world-wide all-weather availability of navigation signals. In this light, the OMEGA radio navigation system and, in particular, the Differential configuration are briefly discussed including description of statistical models for OMEGA errors. A suggested data processing scheme based on the Kalman filter is presented; the filter makes optimal use of postulated system models to appropriately weight Differential OMEGA measurements given statistical knowledge of various environmental effects. Numerical results are obtained in the form of root-mean-square accuracies in estimating ocean currents. Although there are certain as yet unresolved operational factors, the results are seen to be promising suggesting potential advantage to the scheme.