Extracting the characteristics of internal waves in the Strait of Hormuz using SAR satellite images

Subject Areas : Natural resources and environmental management

Hamed Deldar ¹ , Mohamad Maleki ² , hasan yousefi ³

1 - پژوهشگر پژوهشگاه ملی اقیانوس شناسی و علوم جوی
2 - MSc. Graduated, Department of Physical Oceanography, Faculty of marine Sienese, University of Tarbiat Modares, Iran
3 - MSc. Graduated, Department of Physical Oceanography, Faculty of marine Sienese, University of Tarbiat Modares, Iran

Received: 2024-05-16 Accepted : 2024-10-08 Published : 2025-10-11

Keywords: Internal waves, Strait of Hormuz, remote sensing, SAR images, mooring.,

Abstract :

Internal waves are one of the important phenomena in oceans and are usually generated by tidal currents and are propagated in the water column. Remote sensing and field measurements are two methods for measuring internal waves. This study investigates the internal waves in the Strait of Hormuz using C-band images from the Sentinel-1 satellite Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR). The extracted parameters from these images for the years 2021 and 2022 include: wavelength, propagation speed, direction of propagation, and wave amplitude. For validation, a moored array with three fast-response temperature sensors was deployed in the area from early March 2022 to the end of June 2022, recording data every 30 seconds. Ultimately, after extracting the mentioned parameters from satellite images and field measurements, the results indicate that the difference in the magnitude of wave amplitude and speed between the measured parameters and field data is approximately 28% and 7.1%, respectively. This difference may be due to errors in detecting dark and bright pixels in edge detection patterns. It is suggested that using images from other sensors and employing other edge detection patterns can reduce the error in the measured parameters.