| Summary: | 2019 Joint Satellite Conference, 28 September - 4 October 2019, Boston Following the success of the QuikSCAT, Oceansat-2, HY-2A, and RapidScat missions, a new Ku-band rotating pencil-beam scatterometer, ScatSat-1 from the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) was launched in September 2016. Scatterometer sea surface winds have been used in a wide variety of atmospheric, oceanic, and climate applications. Moreover, thanks to the near-real-time data distribution of most missions, scatterometer wind data have been successfully assimilated into numerical weather prediction models for more than two decades. In the framework of the EUMETSAT Numerical Weather Prediction Satellite Application Facility (NWP SAF) and Ocean and Sea Ice Satellite Application Facility (OSI SAF), the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute (KNMI) has developed the so-called Pencil-beam Wind data Processor (PenWP), which has provided and provides near-real-time Level 2 (swath-based) sea surface wind fields for all past and current rotating pencil-beam scatterometer missions. The main components of PenWP include calibration, inversion, quality control, and ambiguity removal. Research & Development activities within the NWP SAF and OSI SAF over the past 15 years have focused on the improvement of the different algorithms of the scatterometer wind data processors, including PenWP. Recent results show that the Ku-band quality control (QC) can be further improved. Following the recent development of the Ku-band forward model, in this paper we focus on providing a new Ku-band pencil-beam scatterometer QC, which successfully filters poor quality winds while keeping the ScatSat-1 good quality winds, including those acceptable retrievals under increased wind variability conditions. In the current version of PenWP, a maximum likelihood estimator (MLE-) based QC is used to discern between good- and poor-quality winds. MLE QC is generally effective in flagging rain contamination and increased sub-cell wind variability in the ocean surface ...
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