Programme: Ocean Sea Ice – Satellite Application Facility (OSI-SAF EUMETSAT) Visiting Scientist Activity
Project title: Analysis and validation of SeaWinds-derived coastal winds
Acronym: OSI_VSA_24_02
Duration: 1 March 2024 – 31 January 2025
Project budget: 34,509 EUR
ISMAR budget: 34,509 EUR
Web site: n.a.
Summary:
This project aims to validate the ocean vector wind (OVW) field derived from the Seawinds scatterometer, which flew onboard the polar orbiting satellite platform QuikSCAT from 1999 to 2009.
Scatterometer-derived OVW represent the golden standard of satellite remotely sensed ocean surface winds. Unfortunately, scatterometer backscattering coefficients may be severely contaminated by land presence in their footprint in coastal areas, leading to poor sampling within approximately 30 km to the coastline.
Recently, a new empirical methodology called “noise regularization” has been successfully implemented to reduce land contamination of Seawinds backscattering coefficients. In fact, coastal Seawinds backscattering coefficients appear much less contaminated after this procedure is applied. The derived winds have been validated against Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) winds derived from the Advanced SAR instrument, which flew onboard the European polar orbiting satellite Envisat.
However, a systematic and extensive validation of winds retrieved using this methodology is still lacking. This project aims to fill this gap comparing Seawinds- derived winds against those derived at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL-NASA), coastal buoys and model winds with triple-collocation.
Contact person in ISMAR: giuseppe.grieco@cnr.it
Partnership:
- Koninklijk Nederlands Meteorologisch Instituut – KNMI (The Netherlands)
- Institut de Ciències del Mar -ICM-CSIC – (Spain)
- Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche – Istituto di Scienze Marine – CNR-ISMAR – (Italy)
