Time-domain processing for ocean surface parameter extraction from HF-radar data and related applications

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The usual approach to the processing of high-frequency radar data for ocean surface parameter extraction, as well as related applications, such as compensation for platform motion when the radar system is deployed on a moving platform or ship, has been to first form the Doppler spectrum from the data, which involves transforming the acquired data to the frequency domain.  Although this has some advantages, such as separating out the first and higher-order Doppler energies into different regions in frequency space, it also leads to increased processing cost and potentially less accurate results due to transformation of the data to the frequency domain. Building on my previous work in the area, the research in this proposal aims to forego the usual first step of HF radar data processing of transforming it to the frequency domain, and instead process the data directly in the time domain, where it is acquired.  Results from my previous work shows that this leads to conceptually-simpler algorithms which are often more accurate than their frequency-domain counterparts, and also faster in their implementations. Recently, links have been discovered between the problems of motion compensation of HF radar data acquired from moving platforms and Micro-Doppler detection of e.g., Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) from X-band radar data.  Links between these two seemingly-disparate problems will be exploited to derive new results and solutions to each of them, which could potentially be of benefit to the defense and security industries, for which automatic detection of non-cooperative UAVs is becoming an increasingly important and pressing problem. High-frequency radar is already used as a lower-cost alternative to monitoring ocean surface parameters such as significant wave height and principal wave direction over large swaths of the ocean, up to several hundreds of kilometres away from their coastal deployments.  Research based on time-domain high-frequency radar algorithms will help Canada by reducing the cost and complexity of high-frequency radar deployments used for many applications, such as environmental monitoring and national defence.  It will also allow for more effective deployments of such systems on moving platforms and ships, as already-developed time-domain algorithms for motion compensation of data acquired from these platforms and ships have already been shown to be more accurate and efficient than their frequency-domain counterparts.