Advances in Ku-band scatterometer Quality Control

The Satellite Application Facilities (SAFs) are dedicated centres of excellence for processing satellite data – hosted by a National Meteorological Service – which utilise specialist expertise from institutes based in Member States. EUMETSAT created Satellite Application Facilities (SAFs) to complement its Central Facilities capability in Darmstadt. The Ocean and Sea Ice Satellite Application Facility (OSI SAF, http://osi-saf.eumetsat.int/) is one of eight EUMETSAT SAFs, which provide users with operational data and software products. More on SAFs can be read at https://www.eumetsat.int. The objective of the OSI SAF is the operational near real-time production and distribution of a coherent set of information, derived from earth observation satellites, and characterising the ocean surface and the energy fluxes through it: sea surface temperature, radiative fluxes, wind vector and sea ice characteristics. For some variables, the OSI SAF is also aiming at providing long term data records for climate applications, based on reprocessing activities. KNMI is involved in the OSI SAF as the centre where the level 1 to level 2 scatterometer wind processing is carried out. The scatterometer is an instrument that provides information on the wind field near the ocean surface, and scatterometry is the knowledge of extracting this information from the instrument’s output [1]. KNMI has a long experience in scatterometer processing and is developing generic software for this purpose. Processing systems have been developed for the ERS, SeaWinds, ASCAT, Oceansat-2/OSCAT, RapidScat, Haiyang 2(HY-2)/HSCAT, ScatSat-1/OSCAT, and CFOSAT scatterometers. This documents summarises algorithm improvements in Quality Control (QC) for Ku-band wind scatterometry, leading to the implementation of two new QC flags for the wind products.