DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.17130490
title: Radar-derived roller quantities used in "Radar estimates of surfzone dissipation drive a morphological evolution model"

description: This dataset contains radar-derived surfzone surface roller energy flux and dissipation data used in:

Grossmann, F., Streßer, M., Raubenheimer, B. & Elgar, S. (2025). Radar estimates of surfzone dissipation drive a morphological evolution model, Manuscript submitted for publication.

The study investigates the morphological evolution of a sandbar between consecutive bathymetric surveys in environmental conditions that cause onshore (denoted ON1 and ON2) and offshore (denoted OFF) bar migration.

The coherent marine radar (CMR) deployment at the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Research and Development Center's Field Research Facility (FRF) in Duck, North Carolina, USA, was initiated as part of the During Nearshore Event Experiment (DUNEX). A detailed description of the deployment setup is available in:

Streßer, M., Collins, C. O. I., Lund, B., Humbertson, J., Horstmann, J., Carrasco, R., Spore, N., & Brodie, K. (2024). Coherent Marine X-Band Radar Deployment during DUNEX (Techreport No. ERDC/CHL TR-24-16). US Army Engineer Research and Development Center, Coastal and Hydraulics Laboratory. https://doi.org/10.21079/11681/49218
description: The data was processed using the methodology described in:

Streßer, M., Horstmann, J., & Baschek, B. (2022). Surface Wave and Roller Dissipation Observed With Shore-Based Doppler Marine Radar. Journal of Geophysical Research: Oceans, 127(8), e2022JC018437. https://doi.org/10.1029/2022JC018437

Specifically, the roller energy was computed using equation 14, flux of roller energy using equation 15, and the dissipation of roller energy using equation 17 of Streßer et al. (2022).

The radar roller dissipation scaling factor was set to Br = 0.013. The roller slope parameter was set to βs = 0.1.

All quantities are computed from 7-min long coherent radar records with a static antenna pointing to 60° from North (nautical convention, i.e. counter-clockwise from North). The radar was located at Latitude/Longitude = 36.1822972/−75.7511785. The antenna was located at an elevation of approx. 15 m (relative to NorthAmerican Vertical Datum of 1988).  

As in Streßer et al. (2022), roller energy and dissipation were smoothed using a 5-point moving average filter (in space) to mitigate measurement noise. The unsmoothed raw values are also included in the data set.  
description: Acknowledgments

We thank the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Research and Development Center's Field Research Facility for the use of their facility and support of their staff. Special thanks to Kate Brodie, Tripp Collins and Josh Humberston for inviting the Department of Radar Hydrography to join DUNEX and for the installation of the radar on site.
description: Variables in CMR data structure:

      t: UTC time in Matlab datetime format       r: range, i.e. distance from radar antenna [m]         
   xFRF: cross-shore coordinate of FRF local reference system [m]             
   yFRF: alongshore coordinate of FRF local reference system [m]       
     Er: roller energy [J m^(-2)]
     Fr: flux of roller energy [W m^(-2)]     Dr: roller dissipation [W m^(-2)]  Er_raw, Fr_raw, and Dr_raw are raw quantities before spatial smoothing.The data is stored in Matlab® v7.3 format.