Operational Radar and Optical MApping

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Operational Radarand Optical MApping
Partners The OROMA team consists of 7 developers
and 4 end users from coastal management

• Overview
• Beach nourishment is the most
• valuable measure to conduct
• coastal protection. To keep
• control on the sand induced to
• the near shore environment
• it needs area covering monitoring.
• As examples of the OROMA work
• two different methods using ground
• based radar for the bathymetric
• survey are presented at this poster
• Imaging the ocean wave field
• Scanning sea surface roughness
• The water quality is indicated by
• its concentration of algae, suspended
• matter and yellow substance.
• These substances can be measured
• by optical remote sensing from space
• borne sensors. However, the quality

Information Abstraction within OROMA

• Objectives
• Monitoring of near coastal morphodynamics
• and water quality parameters
• Combining Remote Sensing Modelling and
  Electronic Networking Techniques
• Presentation of most actual coastal
• monitoring information in near-real time

Information abstraction is the backbone of OROMA.
Measurements from ship and remote sensing data
from land, aircrafts and satellites need to be
inte- grated into models in order to
provide thematic information. Their access has to
be made easily available to coastal managers.
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Operational Radarand Optical MApping
Bathymetry changes derived from radar
Comparison Normalised Radar Cross Section with
Depth
Water quality monitoring
Bathymetric maps are deduced by inverse modeling
10 minutes radar observations of the ocean wave
field. The model uses the wave refraction
depending on the local water depth. The shown
bathymetric change is observed between 2001 and
2003. Close to shore a loss of sand is obvious,
whereas a broad stripe between 200 m and 800
m distance from shore shows significant increase
of sand. At the distance of around 1000 m we
state another sand reduction zone. These results
have been verified by conventional observations.
On the right the local water depth is given with
z pointing upwards. Under the use of
a calibrated radar the Normalised Radar
Cross Section (NRCS) was composed to a map. High
gradients in the bathymetry induce high radar
cross sections. The next step during the still
running OROMA project is to train an
hydrodynamic model to reproduce the radar map
from the actual bathymetry. At a later time only
the radar map will be acquired and the model will
be inverted to produce the new bathymetry.
Monitoring of the water quality by ships is time
and cost consuming. Water constituent
concentrations derived from space borne sensors
MERIS, SeaWiFS and MODIS provide complementary
data, potentially leading to a reduction of
in-situ measurements. It has been proven that the
remote sensing data are comparable to the
existing long-term in-situ archives by local
calibration of the underlying bio-optical
algorithms.