The SeaWinds scatterometer was developed to measure ocean surface winds from space at a resolution of 25 km. Recently, a higher resolution (2.5 km) SeaWinds product has proven useful in several applications. However, high resolution wind field estimates are very noisy and this complicates ambiguity selection. The current high resolution ambiguity selection procedure is initialized (or nudged) by the low resolution (L2B) result which may not produce sufficiently accurate results. This paper

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... ibes an entirely new method for initializing scatterometer wind ambiguity selection, especially for high resolution winds. This initializing field is obtained by spatially filtering enhanced resolution backscatter measurements, retrieving the wind, and then correcting inconsistencies in the resulting first ambiguity wind field. For nudging, this field is comparable in quality to the numerical weather prediction (NWP) estimates, and is used independent of the NWP winds to nudge the high resolution ambiguities and produce improved wind field estimates. 0-7803-9510-7/06/$20.00