Windowed Envelope Statistics for Time-Domain Significant Wave Height Estimation From HF Radar
Abstract
Significant wave height (SWH) retrieval from high-frequency (HF) radar typically relies on a weak second-order Doppler continuum that is sensitive to noise, interference, and spectral leakage. This letter presents a Windowed Envelope Statistics Estimator (WESE) that operates directly on beam-formed time-domain voltages. A second-order term obtained from a Neumann expansion of the rough-surface field equation motivates quadratic compensation of localized radar features. WESE extracts the mean, standard deviation, or variance from overlapping windows of the in-phase, quadrature, or envelope-magnitude sequence, followed by quadratic compensation, rank ordering, least-squares regression, and causal smoothing. Evaluation used 335 synchronized hourly observations from a 13.385 MHz, 12-element WERA system at Argentia, Newfoundland and Labrador. The optimal configuration used quadrature variance, a 16-sample window, 896 retained chronological samples, and 30-h smoothing, achieving an RMSE of 0.152 m and a Pearson correlation of 0.978. This represents RMSE reductions of 32.1% and 18.7% relative to previously reported linear and second-order compensated ordered-statistics models, respectively. The results demonstrate robust time-domain SWH estimation without explicit Doppler-spectrum construction.
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BibTeX
@misc{chandrasekara2026windowed,
title = {{Windowed Envelope Statistics for Time-Domain Significant Wave Height Estimation From HF Radar}},
author = {Senal Chandrasekara and Reza Shahidi},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = sep,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2609.10920},
eprint = {2609.10920},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.10920},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Windowed Envelope Statistics for Time-Domain Significant Wave Height Estimation From HF Radar
AU - Senal Chandrasekara
AU - Reza Shahidi
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/09/10
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2609.10920
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.10920
AB - Significant wave height (SWH) retrieval from high-frequency (HF) radar typically relies on a weak second-order Doppler continuum that is sensitive to noise, interference, and spectral leakage. This letter presents a Windowed Envelope Statistics Estimator (WESE) that operates directly on beam-formed time-domain voltages. A second-order term obtained from a Neumann expansion of the rough-surface field equation motivates quadratic compensation of localized radar features. WESE extracts the mean, standard deviation, or variance from overlapping windows of the in-phase, quadrature, or envelope-magnitude sequence, followed by quadratic compensation, rank ordering, least-squares regression, and causal smoothing. Evaluation used 335 synchronized hourly observations from a 13.385 MHz, 12-element WERA system at Argentia, Newfoundland and Labrador. The optimal configuration used quadrature variance, a 16-sample window, 896 retained chronological samples, and 30-h smoothing, achieving an RMSE of 0.152 m and a Pearson correlation of 0.978. This represents RMSE reductions of 32.1% and 18.7% relative to previously reported linear and second-order compensated ordered-statistics models, respectively. The results demonstrate robust time-domain SWH estimation without explicit Doppler-spectrum construction.
ER -