ON HIGH-RESOLUTION SCATTEROMETER WINDS NEAR THE COAST

The Advanced SCATterometer (ASCAT) operational processing uses spatial filtering with a Hamming window to avoid noise due to aliasing. The spatial extent of the Hamming windows prevents processing near the coast line. However, sea surface winds near the coast are very important, given that activities related to shipping and transport, off-shore resource exploitation, wind parks and tourism are most intense near the coast. Furthermore, coastal winds are also important for monitoring ecological and erosion processes. To provide ASCAT winds closer to the coast, three different products have been generated with spatial filtering over a circular box, and subjected to validation both in coastal and open ocean areas. The product made with a backscatter averaging cut-off radius Rmax = 15 km closely resembles the operational ASCAT 12.5-km product. However, the smaller spatial averaging extent of the box compared to the Hamming window, not only allows retrieving winds closer to the coast, but also captures smaller ocean wind variability and it is consequently providing greater consistency of the ASCAT backscatter triplet with the wind Geophysical Model Function (GMF), as observed by a reduced elimination of points by the Quality Control (QC). Due to the low noise observed in this product, we anticipate that in cases with high wind gradients, such as near tropical cyclones, even higher resolution winds than the ones presented here may be worthwhile retrieving