Long-Term Scatterometer Wind Climate Data Records

Abstract

The European Organisation for the Exploitation of Meteorological Satellites (EUMETSAT) Ocean and Sea Ice Satellite Application Facility (OSI SAF) produces near-real-time scatterometer ocean vector winds since almost 20 years already. Data from the European remote sensing satellites (ERS-1 and ERS-2 scatterometer), QuikSCAT (SeaWinds), Metop (ASCAT), Oceansat 2 (OSCAT), and RapidScat on the International Space Station have been, or are being, produced. The OSI SAF scatterometer products, produced at the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute, provide superior comparison to both buoy and numerical weather prediction (NWP) datasets. Moreover, the wind processing software is publicly available through the EUMETSAT NWP SAF. An increasing amount of users employs scatterometer wind data for climate studies. However, the wind retrieval algorithms have been continuously improved over the years and the currently existing archives of near-real-time data are not always suitable to fulfill the need for homogeneous datasets spanning a longer period of time. Currently, only few validated vector wind climate datasets are available. Therefore, the OSI SAF is reprocessing several offline datasets. This paper is focusing on two climate data records from SeaWinds and ASCAT winds, which together span the period from 1999 to 2014. The data are compared to the NWP model and buoy winds. The stability of the wind characteristics is assessed and an attempt is made to attribute temporal changes to climatological and NWP model changes over time.