Optimisation of Rotating, Range-gated Fanbeam Scatterometer for Wind Retrieval, Task 3b report, Results and Conclusions

This document summarizes the results of the end-to-end performance evaluation of various instrumental settings for the rotating range-gated fanbeam scatterometer (RFSCAT). The goal of this evaluation is to compare different systems in order to study the impact of system parameters on the wind retrieval performance and to establish a way towards an optimized wind scatterometer on the basis of the rotating fanbeam concept.

The evaluation of the wind retrieval performance makes use of the concept of a figure of merit (FoM) which has been developed within this study. The details on this concept and on the wind retrieval in general are given in the Task 3a Report. All details of the computations of the measurement geometry and measurement error within the Pseudo-Level-1b-Generator were reported in the Task-2b Report. Descriptions of the various geophysical model functions (GMF) which relate the radar measurements including the measurement geometry to ocean surface winds were summarized in the Task-1 Report.