Helzel, T., Hansen, B., Kniephoff, M., Petersen, L., Valentin, M., 2013. Ocean Radar for Monitoring of Coastal Zones – new aspects after getting a world wide frequency allocation for these instruments

For more than 20 years, Ocean Radars have proved their reliability for diverse oceanographic application purposes and prediction situations. However, they were operating as systems on experimental license basis only. At the World Radiocommunication Conference 2012 (WRC-12) the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) has for the first time officially recognised oceanographic radar. This paper shows how in the future, primary (under some restrictions) and secondary frequency bands will be allocated worldwide for these powerful oceanographic sensors and how these bands allow to use the instruments for long and short ranges with a spatial resolution of up to 300 m. This step forward for the Ocean Radar result into a change from being experimental systems to operational applications. As a conclusion this will attract new potential users and the scientific community should use this opportunity to initiate new research projects. Samples from various applications and different validation studies with the ocean radar WERA demonstrate the advantage of this ocean radar technology. Especially the land-based installation of these systems make them attractive as they are easy to deploy and provide a very good data availability at low costs with the convenience of on-shore installations. Some ideas for new applications are introduced.