Assimilation of HY-2A scatterometer ambiguous winds based on feature thinning

Abstract

This paper focuses on the data assimilation methods for sea surface winds, based on the level-2B HY-2A satellite microwave scatterometer wind products. We propose a new feature thinning method, which is herein used to screen scatterometer winds while maintaining the key structure of the wind field in the process of data thinning for highresolution satellite observations. We also accomplish feeding the ambiguous wind solutions directly into the data assimilation system, thus making better use of the retrieved information while simplifying the assimilation process of the scatterometer products. A numerical simulation experiment involving Typhoon Danas shows that our method gives better results than the traditional approach. This method may be a valuable alternative for operational satellite data assimilation.