Validation of SeaWinds 25 km winds

This report is written to establish the quality of the EUMETSAT Ocean and Sea Ice Satellite Application Facility (OSI SAF) QuikSCAT wind fields, notably at high resolution (25 km).
Currently, an operational OSI SAF QuikSCAT wind product is available at 100 km resolution. This product is especially suitable to assimilate into Numerical Weather Prediction models, but less appropriate for nowcasting, since small-scale phenomena in the wind fields are not visible. The 100-km product is made by spatially averaging the backscatter values that are available at 25 km resolution in the NOAA QuikSCAT product. This averaging is done in order to reduce the noise in the wind field. For the OSI SAF 25-km wind product appropriate meteorological structures are used to spatially smooth the noise. This is achieved by the combination of the so-called MSS and 2DVAR schemes as further elaborated in this report.