Correction of SeaWinds Normalized Radar Cross Sections for improved coastal winds

• Published in: 2022 IEEE International Workshop on Metrology for the Sea; Learning to Measure Sea Health Parameters (MetroSea)
• Main Authors: Grieco, Giuseppe, Stoffelen, Ad, Verhoef, Anton, Vogelzang, J., Portabella, Marcos
• Other Authors: European Organisation for the Exploitation of Meteorological Satellites
• Format: Book Part
• Language: English
• Published: Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers 2022
• Subjects: Ocean vector wind; Scatterometer; Sea Winds; Sea ice
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10261/286808; https://doi.org/10.1109/MetroSea55331.2022.9950798; https://doi.org/10.13039/501100010560

2022 IEEE International Workshop on Metrology for the Sea; Learning to Measure Sea Health Parameters (MetroSea), 3-5 October 2022, Milazzo, Italy.-- © 2022 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.-- 5 pages, 9 figures This paper presents a new methodology to correct the land-contaminated normalized radar cross-section (σ0) measurements acquired by the SeaWinds scatterometer, which flew onboard the QuikSCAT satellite platform from 1999 to 2009, operated by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). This method is based on the hypothesis that contaminated σ0s are linearly dependent on the Land Contribution Ratio (LCR) index, which is defined as the ratio of the footprint area contaminated by the presence of land to the total footprint area. Furthermore, the σ0 deviations from the expected contaminated σ0 values are “regularized” using an adimensional constant, which is defined as the ratio of the noise level evaluated at the σ0 level of the sea to the noise level of the expected contaminated σ0 level. The preliminary results show that this methodology is effective up to few kilometers to the coast. In addition, it prevents the excessive presence of negative corrected σ0s This work has been carried out in the context of the Visiting Scientist Activity ”Coastal PenWP”, (OSI VSA 21 03) issued by the Ocean Sea Ice Satellite Application Facilities (OSI-SAF) of the European Agency for the Exploitation of Meteorological Satellites (EUMETSAT) Peer reviewed