Aquarius Wind Speed Products: Algorithms and Validation

Alexander G. Fore, Simon H. Yueh, Wenqing Tang, Akiko K. Hayashi, Gary S. E. Lagerloef
2014 IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing  
This paper introduces and validates the Aquarius scatterometer-only wind speed algorithm and the combined active passive (CAP) wind speed products. The scatterometer-only algorithm uses the co-polarized radar cross-section to determine the ocean surface wind speed with a maximum-likelihood estimator approach while the CAP algorithm uses both the scatterometer and radiometer channels to achieve a simultaneous ocean vector wind and sea surface salinity retrieval. We discuss complications in the
more » ... eed retrieval due to the shape of the scatterometer model function at L-band and develop mitigation strategies. We find the performance of the Aquarius scatterometer-only wind speed is better than 1.00 ms −1 , with best performance for low wind speeds and increasing noise levels as the wind speed increases. The CAP wind speed product is significantly better than the scatterometer-only due to the inclusion of passive measurements and achieves 0.70 ms −1 root-mean-square error.
doi:10.1109/tgrs.2013.2267616 fatcat:gdxfssm2znevfj2lvluh6cz3fy