Sea Monitoring Networks

HF coastal radar technology represents to some extent a fortuitous outcome of the military use of radars for aircraft and ship detection. As of World War II, a strong backscattering of radar signals from the sea surface was often observed in installations close to the sea and considered as noise (Teague et al., 1997). The mechanism underlying this effect was first understood by Crombie (1955), whose observations were followed, after more than a decade, by a number of theoretical investigations which laid the ground to the development of actual measuring systems (for a review of earlier developments of this technique see Barrick, 1978; for the current state of knowledge Paduan and Washburn, 2013)