Abstract
Since January 2012, the National Satellite Ocean Application Service has released operational wind products from the HY-2A scatterometer (HY2-SCAT), using the maximum-likelihood estimation (MLE) method with a median filter. However, the quality of the winds retrieved from HY2-SCAT depends on the sub-satellite cross-track location, and poor azimuth separation in the nadir region causes particularly low-quality wind products in this region. However, an improved scheme, i.e., a multiple solution scheme (MSS) with a two-dimensional variational analysis method (2DVAR), has been proposed by the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute to overcome such problems. The present study used the MSS in combination with a 2DVAR technique to retrieve wind data from HY2-SCAT observations. The parameter of the empirical probability function, used to indicate the probability of each ambiguous solution being the “true” wind, was estimated based on HY2-SCAT data, and the 2DVAR method used to remove ambiguity in the wind direction. A comparison between MSS and ECMWF winds showed larger deviations at both low wind speeds (below 4 m/s) and high wind speeds (above 17 m/s), whereas the wind direction exhibited lower bias and good stability, even at high wind speeds greater than 24 m/s. The two HY2-SCAT wind data sets, retrieved by the standard MLE and the MSS procedures were compared with buoy observations. The RMS error of wind speed and direction were 1.3 m/s and 17.4°, and 1.3 m/s and 24.0° for the MSS and MLE wind data, respectively, indicating that MSS wind data had better agreement with the buoy data. Furthermore, the distributions of wind fields for a case study of typhoon Soulik were compared, which showed that MSS winds were spatially more consistent and meteorologically better balanced than MLE winds.
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Supported by the National High Technology Research and Development Program of China (863 Program) (No. 2013AA09A505), the Shandong Joint Fund for Marine Science Research Centers (No. U1406404), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 41106152), and the National Key Technology R&D Program of China (No. 2013BAD13B01)
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Wang, Z., Zhao, C., Zou, J. et al. An improved wind retrieval algorithm for the HY-2A scatterometer. Chin. J. Ocean. Limnol. 33, 1201–1209 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00343-015-4145-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00343-015-4145-3