Reconstructed Wind Fields from Multi-Satellite Observations

• Published in: Remote Sensing
• Main Authors: Ruohan Tang, Deyou Liu, Guoqi Han, Zhimin Ma, Brad De Young
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Published: Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute 2014
• Subjects: sea surface winds; SAR; scatterometer; reconstruction; heapsort bucket method; topdown search; modified Gauss–Markov theorem; Canada; Newfoundland
• Online Access: https://doi.org/10.3390/rs6042898

We present and validate a method of reconstructing high-resolution sea surface wind fields from multi-sensor satellite data over the Grand Banks of Newfoundland off Atlantic Canada. Six-hourly ocean wind fields from blended products (including multi-satellite measurements) with 0.25° spatial resolution and 226 RADARSAT-2 synthetic aperture radar (SAR) wind fields with 1-km spatial resolution have been used to reconstruct new six-hourly wind fields with a resolution of 10 km for the period from August 2008 to December 2010, except July 2009 to November 2009. The reconstruction process is based on the heapsort bucket method with topdown search and the modified Gauss–Markov theorem. The result shows that the mean difference between the reconstructed wind speed and buoy-estimated wind speed is smaller than 0.6 m/s, and the standard deviation is smaller than 2.5 m/s. The mean difference in wind direction between reconstructed and buoy estimates is 3.7°; the standard deviation is 40.2°. There is fair agreement between the reconstructed wind vectors and buoy-estimated ones.