Validation of HF radar probing of the vertical shear of surface currents by acoustic Doppler current profiler measurements

Abstract

There exists no practical way of measuring vertical shear in the water just below the air/sea interface that contains information on air/water momentum fluxes. The paper is concerned with the validation of a recently proposed method of remote sensing of sea subsurface shear by means of a commonly used single-frequency HF radar based on the use of the second-order Bragg echo. To this end a dedicated field experiment was carried out off the French Mediterranean coast. In parallel with the HF radar probing, the independent simultaneous measurements of the subsurface shear profile were obtained by means of acoustic Doppler current profiler mounted on a floating platform, whose position was monitored by GPS. The comparison shows a fairly good agreement of the results (the discrepancy does not exceed 15%) and suggests a higher accuracy of the HF probing. Coyright 2004 by the American Geophysical Union.