Researchers at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth/SMAST have deployed a CODAR station at the National Park Service Cape Cod National Seashore site near Nauset, Massachusetts. CODAR is a high-frequency remote-sensing radar system that is used to measure coastal ocean surface currents out to a range of about 150 km. Transmmited 5 Mhz signal are back-scattered from the wave ocean surface. Employing the principles of Bragg scattering and the Doppler shift, CODAR data is used to calculate the speed and direction of the radial component of surface current.

Our long range CODAR on outer Cape Cod is paired with a similar Rutgers University CODAR on Nantucket to produce hourly surface maps of surface current vectors with a spatial resolution of about 6 km.