The Effect of Horizontal Shear on Extracting Water Currents From Surface Wave Data

The dispersive motion of surface waves is now routinely used to remotely measure the currents close beneath the surface of oceans and other natural flows. The current manifests as wavelength-dependent Doppler shifts in the spatiotemporal wave spectrum, which is obtained by performing a Fourier transform of an observed wave field, a procedure which assumes that the current is horizontally uniform within the field of view. This assumption is frequently not satisfied. We here analyze the effects of the presence of horizontal shear in the velocity field, with a special emphasis on biases: "measured" velocities that differ systematically in magnitude and/or direction compared with the average current within the field of view. We generate random synthetic wave data according to a spectrum prescribed at the domain center while varying the current and its gradient, and the mean direction theta 0 and angular spread of the waves' propagation direction, from which we extract Doppler shift velocities (DSVs) using one of the most common numerical schemes. Assuming currents vary by up to 10% of a characteristic wave phase velocity across the field of view, we find that strong biases can occur for highly directional wave spectra, strongly dependent on theta 0 and the current direction relative to that of its magnitude gradient. We discuss how biases arise in the DSV extraction procedure and suggest practical steps to discover the presence of biases.