New Technologies for Accurate Measurements of Ocean Waves and Related Parameters from an Aircraft

John P. Dugan and Cynthia C. Piotrowski

Abstract:	Ever increasing investments along our nation’s coasts support the development of fixed structures. The safety of these structures from encroachment by the ocean depends upon accurate engineering studies of cause and effect. These depend upon accurate measurements of waves, currents and water depths, as these all affect the high stresses of large waves during storms. In turn, prodigious transport of sediments causes significant accretion or erosion, often endangering these fixed structures. Unfortunately, present technologies cannot easily nor accurately measure all of these processes, and particularly not during important storm-related events. This paper describes progress made in the science and technologies for making these important measurements from a unique platform, namely an aircraft. Since the sensor is remote from the area of interest, the approach provides new capability to our armed forces having interests in similar environmental quantities along foreign coastlines. Time series imaging techniques have been developed and applied to sequences of images collected with a turretmounted digital EO camera to provide measurements of all the above quantities. Central to the success of these techniques is our method for co-registering these images on a geodetic reference surface. This relies on an imagebased technique for correcting attitude errors in the GPSINS metadata, reducing inherent errors by an order of magnitude. The resulting retrieved water depths and currents, for instance, are within 10% or better of simultaneously collected ground truth data, which is more than adequate for the needs. The postings, or geodetic locations, of these retrievals, typically are within 2 m of truth, also well within users needs. This paper provides a progress report on the hydrographic survey application, one of the several areas of active investigation.
Published in:	Proceedings of the 2005 National Technical Meeting of The Institute of Navigation January 24 - 26, 2005 The Catamaran Resort Hotel San Diego, CA
Pages:	404 - 415
Cite this article:	Dugan, John P., Piotrowski, Cynthia C., "New Technologies for Accurate Measurements of Ocean Waves and Related Parameters from an Aircraft," Proceedings of the 2005 National Technical Meeting of The Institute of Navigation, San Diego, CA, January 2005, pp. 404-415.
Full Paper:	ION Members/Non-Members: 1 Download Credit Sign In