High-Resolution Remote Sensing Experiment (HIRES)

HIRES is a collaboration between the University of Miami, Johns Hopkins University, the Naval Research Laboratory, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Penn State University, the Environmental Research Institution of Michigan and the University of Southern Mississippi, having as general objective the understanding of the physical events responsible for the appearance of mesoscale and submesoscale oceanographic features in microwaves images of the coastal ocean.

This program helped comprehend the linkage between surface currents induced by the ocean features and its radar image, as well as to determine the relationship between surface roughness and wind stress.

The deployment during the experiment of high-resolution Ocean Surface Current Radar(OSCR) started the interest in the oceanographic community use high frequency radar current measurements for many oceanographic applications.

View HIRES PDF presentation.

INSAR Current Vector field

This shows the first ever computed map of surface vector currents derived from a pair of orthogonally overlapping SAR images.

Note the very high spatial resolution and submesoscale variability of the surface current vectors along the convergence zone of the water mass boundary