Abstract: Specular scattering,which accompanies ocean breaking waves,provides the Doppler spectrum with more power,a wider bandwidth and a larger peak frequency.These Doppler features are used to detect breaking waves,and an algorithm is proposed to obtain the decision thresholds for three parameters.Breaking Doppler spectra as well as breaking positions can be obtained by the thresholds.Detection results agree well with the breaking positions obtained by visual observation.Furthermore,the results are conducted to improve the reversion of ocean wave parameters.Errors and variances of significant wave height and mean period both drop.This allow the conclusion that this algorithm is a promising method for detecting breaking waves for coherent microwave radar.