Improving the Quikscat Derived Winds Near the Coast

This paper describes some preliminary steps to improve the coastal winds retrieved from the Seawinds scatterometer on-board the QuikSCAT satellite platform. In particular, it describes a method for estimating the slice Normalized Radar Cross Section ( σ0 ) noise. Moreover, it shows a simple method for selecting the best-suited σ0 domain to implement a Land Contribution Ratio (LCR) based σ0 correction scheme. The preliminary results suggest that there are some non-negligible differences between the open sea and the “every kind of surface” noise characteristics, even if such differences are not reported in the QuikSCAT files. The intra-egg σ0 biases may amount to approximately ±0.6 dB for H-Pol acquisitions and half that for V-Pol, but the impact on the noise estimation amounts to less than 2%. Finally, the LCR-based σ0 correction scheme is now being tested and developed in the linear domain.