Suitability of the Southern Australia Integrated Marine Observing System’s (SA-IMOS) HF-Radar for operational forecasting

The IMOS HF-Radar array in South Australia provides observations of the ocean waters south of Spencer Gulf. In addition to ocean surface currents, the data from this array can be processed to provide near-real time observations of wave statistics and wind direction. The Australian Bureau of Meteorology requires access to these observations for forecast modelling but currently only have a single Waverider buoy operating in South Australian waters at Cape du Couedic, south of Kangaroo Island, which provides no directional information. The HF-Radar array could potentially be used to augment the current operational observation systems used by the Bureau. In this paper we evaluate the performance of the HF-Radar system against observations from the Waverider buoy and an automatic weather station at Neptune Island and also compare the HF-Radar observations to a wave model based on the eSA-Marine forecast grid. The results suggest that upgrading the HF-Radar to provide near-real time wave and wind data would provide a new, independent source of environmental observations for the Bureau.