A significant wave height (SWH) estimation method for X-band ocean radar images based on the shadow modulation principle is studied. The conventional shadow method obtains the wave steepness by analyzing the bright and dark patterns in the radar image and then calculates the SWH. The shadow method relies on accurate estimation of wave steepness, which is the most reliable in the upwave area, so it shows a strong azimuth dependence. Under the actual observation conditions, it is usually difficult to obtain an ideal analysis region to effectively mitigate the direction dependence due to the limitations of physical obstacles and platform attitude changes, which affects the inversion accuracy. To solve the problem, this paper proposes a wave steepness correction method based on harmonic fitting. By establishing a harmonic fitting model between wave steepness and wave angle, the method reconstructs the continuous and stable wave steepness distribution with wave angle from 0° to 360° according to limited data points. Then, the wave steepness independent of azimuth is obtained when the wave angle is 0°. The effectiveness of the proposed wave steepness correction method is validated using a total of 466 sets of radar data collected from 8 November to 18 November 2014 and 10 January to 20 January 2015. After applying the wave steepness correction method, compared to the conventional shadow method without correction, although the correlation coefficient (CC) increased by only 0.07, the bias (BIAS) decreased by 0.12 m, and the average root mean square error (RMSE) decreased by 0.12 m.
Liu et al. (2026) studied this question.