Micro Radar Surface Velocimetry for Hydrologic Signal Processing Using a Bandpass Filtering Approach

The collection of hydrological data is particularly important for the utilization and management of water resources, water conservation, and flood control. Most of the hydrological observation operations should be conducted manually and are time-consuming, strenuous, dangerous, and have low precision. In this study, the shortcomings of the manual observations are overcome and the uncertainties related to the radar-based flow velocity estimations by a sensor in the radar surface current meter are explored. This includes an automatic observation feature and analyses are conducted using the radar signals that are received by the instruments for the real-time observation of the signals. In this study, experiments were conducted at the Water Resources Planning Institute (WRPI) of the Water Resources Agency, Ministry of Economic Affairs, Taiwan and the surface velocity was estimated using the conventional fast Fourier transform (FFT), wavelet transform (WT), and a bandpass filter. The experimental results after signal processing using the bandpass filter were precise, when the tilt angle ranged between 20 and 40 degrees. The 10.525 GHz radar surface current meter adopted in this study is suitable for a tilt angle of 20–40 degrees; the measurement error will be relatively large if the tilt angle is less than 20 degrees or more than 40 degrees.