Session: 14-01-04: Smart and Sustainable Maritime Systems

Submission Number: 156721

Data-Driven Phase-Resolved Sea Surface Reconstruction From Synthetic X-Band Radar Data 

Accurate phase-resolved information on the sea surface can be crucial for well-founded decision making in the maritime sector. This information can be obtained by analyzing X-band radar measurements, which contain sparse information on the surrounding sea. This analysis, referred to as sea surface reconstruction, usually relies on simplified physical models or computationally expensive optimization procedures, thus creating a trade-off between accuracy and computational cost.

This work proposes a purely data-driven approach, which aims at providing accurate sea surface reconstruction from X-band radar data in real-time. For this, state of the art methods from computer vision and deep learning are combined to a powerful CNN-FNO-hybrid model, which maps a context of historic radar images (t<0) to the 2D phase-resolved sea surface at present time (t=0). The training data is generated using the high-order spectral (HOS) method, and features a wide range of sea-state conditions. The synthetic radar images are derived from the HOS simulations using a numeric radar model, which applies shadowing- and tilt modulation, a radar blind zone, and system loss.

The results show that the proposed data-driven approach is capable of faithfully reconstructing the 2D sea surface from sparse radar information over a wide range of governing sea state parameters. Moreover, the approach is able to extrapolate over the radar blind zone, yielding a complete reconstruction of the sea surface within the radar radius.

Presenting Author: Marco Klein German Aerospace Center (DLR), Institute of Maritime Energy Systems

Presenting Author Biography: Dr.-Ing. Marco Klein graduated as Diplom-Ingenieur (Dipl.-Ing.) in naval architecture and ocean engineering at the Technical University Berlin (TUB) in 2006. Prior to his current position as Head of Ship Performance Department at DLR Institute of Maritime Energy Systems, he worked as senior researcher at Institute for Structural Dynamics Hamburg University of Technology (TUHH), as post-doctoral researcher at Institute for Ship Structural Design and Analysis (TUHH) as well as research assistant at the Ocean Engineering Division at TUB where he received his doctorate in 2015. His area of expertise is in the field of ship hydrodynamics, wave-structure interaction and related topics. At his current position, his research focuses on ship performance and efficiency to support the transformation to emission-reduced and emission-free shipping.