This paper describes the remote monitoring of breaking ocean waves generated by Typhoon Nabi, whose name means butterfly in Korean, using a marine X-band radar in the Yongho Man, Busan, Korea. The basic purpose of this study is to investigate the dynamic behavior and to estimate the periods of breaking waves across the surf zone from radar image sequences. In these experiments, the land-based radar system imaged the inshore zone of three miles from the coastline to a isobath of 30 meters. The wave period and the dominant wave direction for breaking ocean waves extracted directly from radar image sequences were 157.4 meters and 298 degrees, respectively. However, the result calculated quantitatively by the continuous wavelet transform (CWT) showed that the period of breaking waves was 154.3 meters. The average difference in breaking wave periods between the value extracted by using EBRL (electronic bearing and range line) of radar and the calculated value by CWT was 3.1 meters, showing that the CWT method is also accurate. These results suggest that a marine X-band radar system is a viable method of monitoring the breaking ocean waves.

• 이대재 | Lee, Dae-Jae