Experimental Evaluation of Bistatic Ocean Wave Remote Sensing System by GPS

Abstract

This paper presents an experimental evaluation of an ocean wave remote sensing system that uses bistatic GPS signal reflection to estimate wave characteristics. In our previous paper, a bistatic ocean wave remote sensing system by GPS was proposed to estimate the characteristics of sea swell near a harbor, and was also evaluated by numerical simulations. In the next phase, a prototype system has been developed and some basic experiments have been carried out in a coastal area in order to evaluate the system experimentally. In this paper, we will outline the prototype system. The system mainly consists of an array antenna, a front-end, and an estimator for ocean wave characteristics. Next, we explain that the estimator for ocean wave characteristics can identify each signal reflected from the ocean waves. Finally, the experiments show that the prototype system can receive the reflected signals from the sea-surface near the coast, and estimate the wave period and wavelength in the direction of the array antenna.