Circulation On the Continental Shelf Within the Mississippi Bight

Document Type

Conference Proceeding

Publication Date

1-1-2013

Department

Marine Science

School

Ocean Science and Engineering

Abstract

The University of Southern Mississippi’s Central Gulf of Mexico Ocean Observing System (CenGOOS) operates three long-range (~200 km) 5 MHz CODAR high frequency radar (HFR) stations at Singing River Island in Pascagoula, Mississippi, Gulf State Park in Orange Beach, Alabama, and Henderson Beach State Park in Destin, Florida. Each station broadcasts electromagnetic (EM) waves that follow the conducting sea surface and are Bragg-scattered preferentially by surface gravity waves with a wavelength of one half the wavelength of the EM waves moving towards or away from the antenna. The back-scattered waves are Doppler shifted by the sum of the speed of the waves through the water and the component of the surface velocity in the radial direction to the receive antenna. If the water depth is sufficient for the deep-water approximation to hold (in this case deeper than 20 m), the wave speed is a function of only the wavelength, so it is known from the Bragg-scattering condition. Thus, the component of the surface velocity radial to the receive antenna can be computed from the amount of Doppler shift, and these components are known as “radials”. Where there is overlapping coverage of radials, the total surface current vectors are estimated. The HFR stations cover much of the Mississippi Bight (MSB) seaward of the 20 m isobath. The surface current fields have been analyzed for annual and seasonal climatology.

Publication Title

Proceedings of SPIE - The International Society for Optical Engineering

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