In March 2021, a trial operation set of ocean radar was first introduced in Hong Kong, and then in early 2022 became stably paired up with one operated by the South China Sea Bureau of the Ministry of Natural Resources of China for filling up the meteorological data void over the eastern part of the South China coastal waters. The ocean radar has undergone various enhancements of hardware and software over the years and has reached a stage of providing useful wind observations for weather monitoring purposes in the majority of cases. This paper documents the novel features of the hardware and software of the ocean radar. The performance of the derived wind and other data from the ocean radar is studied by comparing with two sets of weather buoy observations over an extended period of time (one year from June 2024 to July 2025). The quality of the wind data is considered to be reasonable as compared with the international standards of wind measurement errors. The application of the ocean radar wind observations in monitoring different weather systems is also described, including monsoon surges, surface troughs of low pressure, rainstorms and tropical cyclones. The radar is still found to have difficulties in retrieving the winds of high strength (hurricane force winds) and the circulating flow at the same time. Further research work with the ocean radar is also discussed.
Hui et al. (2026) studied this question.