On High and Extreme Wind Calibration Using ASCAT

Accurate high and extreme sea surface wind observations are essential for the meteorological, ocean, and climate applications. To properly assess and calibrate the current and future satellite-derived extreme winds, including those from the C-band scatterometers, building a consolidated high and extreme wind reference data set is crucial. In this work, a new approach is presented to assess the consistency between moored buoys and stepped-frequency microwave radiometer (SFMR)-derived winds. To overcome the absence of abundant direct collocations between these two data sets, the reprocessed Advanced Scatterometer (ASCAT)-A winds at the 12.5-km resolution, from 2009 to 2017, have been used to perform an indirect SFMR/buoy winds’ intercomparison. The ASCAT/SFMR analysis reveals an ASCAT wind underestimation for winds of above 15 m/s. SFMR measurements are calibrated using GPS drop-wind-sondes (dropsondes) data and averaged along-track to represent ASCAT spatially. On the other hand, ASCAT and buoy winds are in good agreement up to 25 m/s. The buoy high-wind quality has been confirmed using a triple collocation approach. Comparing these results, both SFMR and buoy winds appear to be highly correlated with ASCAT at the high-wind regime; however, they show a very different wind speed scaling. An SFMR-based recalibration of ASCAT winds is proposed, the so-called ASCAT dropsonde-scale winds, for use by the extreme wind operational community. However, further work is required to reconcile dropsonde (thus, SFMR) and buoy wind measurements under extreme wind conditions.