SeaWinds-derived winds in coastal areas

This paper presents a new methodology to improve the sampling of coastal winds derived from the SeaWinds scatterometer, which flew onboard the polar orbiting satellite platform Quick Scatterometer (QuikSCAT) from 1999 until 2009. The coastal SeaWinds Normalized Radar Cross Sections (σ 0 s) are corrected for land contamination using the so-called "noise-regularization" procedure. The results show that this methodology is effective in filling the typical coastal scatterometer gap of ≈ 30 km. From a visual check on a coastal test area, the distribution of the newly derived winds seems to be consistent with that of the offshore winds. However, proper validation is needed. This is left for the future.