Development of an ASCAT coastal wind product

Near-shore sea-surface wind field information can be important in a number of applications, such as in semi-enclosed seas and in coastal regions. The ASCAT scatterometer onboard MetOp provides (down to) 12.5-km sampled winds, which can be very useful for such applications. However, at first (soon after launch), only the 25-km sampled winds at a nominal resolution of 50 km will become operational. Because of the spatial averaging (i.e., Hamming filter) of backscatter measurements and the fixed gridding of the wind vector cell (WVC), the wind information within the first 50 km (or more) off the coast is flagged due to land/ice contamination. We propose to use level 1b full resolution (FR) backscatter data to produce 25-km sampled wind information up to 25 km off the coastline. In order to meet such goal, we plan to perform a box averaging of the FR backscatter data over a non-fixed WVC grid. Such grid will be tuned to maximize the number of land/ice decontaminated sea-surface near-shore backscatter measurements used in the processing.