The use of nautical X band radar systems for the sea state monitoring is of timely interest due to the fact that these systems give the possibility to scan the sea surface with high temporal and spatial resolution. This possibility arises thanks to the backscattering from the sea (usually considered clutter to navigation purposes) is visible, under some conditions, on the marine X-band radar images.

Remocean, a spin-off of the Italian CNR – Istituto per il Rilevamento Elettromagnetico dell’Ambiente (IREA) specialized in products to increase the safety and security, trough the real time sea state monitoring and its correlation with all the data coming from the standard ship sensors, and Consilium Italy, a well known leader company in the radar market with high quality X-band radar and oil spill detection features, joined togheter and tested an integrated product combining the feature of the Oil Spill Detection and the analysis of the sea state and waves.

This work is devoted to present the testing and validation activities of the Consilium–Remocean integrated X-band wave radar with oil spill detection and propagation analysis features.

In particular, the work is focused on the processing of the data acquired on board of a cruise vessel with the aim to estimate the relevant sea state parameters, with specific attention to the sea surface current estimation. It is worth nothing that very few examples are present in literature about the estimation of the sea state parameters by X-band radar systems installed on ships moving with high cruise speed as for the case at hand (about 27  knots).