A High-Frequency Radar Oceanic Current Monitoring System for the Texas Coast

The Texas coast represents an area of interest for a wide variety of stakeholders, including the oil industry (for both, exploration and operation purposes), fisheries and living resource management, ecosystem, coastal hazard mitigation and planning, and ocean and coastal education. For more than twenty years, the Texas coast has relied on the Texas Automated Buoy System (TABS) for real-time surface current measurements. In early 2016, the installation of a network of high-frequency coastal ocean radars was implemented to supplement the in situ observations of the TABS system with terrestrial-based remote sensing observations of surface currents. The first set of paired systems, located at Rollover Pass and Surfside Beach, Texas, are providing data hourly in near-real time. A comparison between the time series for the radar and buoys was made in order to determine the correlation coefficient between these signals; correlation coefficients above 0.5 were found for the three buoy locations included in this research, for both, the meridional and zonal component. This project represents the integration of the Texas coast into the high-frequency radar national network, and constitutes the first stage of a three methods comparison, which will include the data of the high frequency radar, an Autonomous Surface Vehicle and TABS.