Acquisition of the Wide Swath Significant Wave Height from HY-2C through Deep Learning

Abstract

Significant wave height (SWH) is of great importance in industries such as ocean engineering, marine resource development, shipping and transportation. Haiyang-2C (HY-2C), the second operational satellite in China’s ocean dynamics exploration series, can provide all-weather, all-day, global observations of wave height, wind, and temperature. An altimeter can only measure the nadir wave height and other information, and a scatterometer can obtain the wind field with a wide swath. In this paper, a deep learning approach is applied to produce wide swath SWH data through the wind field using a scatterometer and the nadir wave height taken from an altimeter. Two test sets, 1-month data at 6 min intervals and 1-day data with an interval of 10 s, are fed into the trained model. Experiments indicate that the extending nadir SWH yields using a real-time wide swath grid product along a track, which can support oceanographic study, is superior for taking the swell characteristics of ERA5 into account as the input of the wide swath SWH model. In conclusion, the results demonstrate the effectiveness and feasibility of the wide swath SWH model.

Keywords

• HY-2C
• deep learning
• the wide swath significant wave height