Using Synthetic Aperture Radar and Radiometer Observations to Estimate Tropical Cyclone Wind Structure and Intensity

Abstract

We present a relatively simple method to estimate tropical cyclone (TC) surface wind structure (34-, 50- and 64-kt wind radii) and intensity (maximum wind speed, MSW) from wind fields acquired from the L-band SMAP radiometer and C-band Sentinel-1A/B and RADARSAT-2 synthetic aperture radar (SAR) between 2015 and 2020. The radiometer and SAR-derived wind radii and MSW are systematically compared with the best-track estimates. The root mean square errors (RMSE) are smaller than the averaged best-track uncertainty estimates for the three wind radii. For TC Lionrock in the Northwest Pacific Ocean, our results show that a combination of the radiometer and SAR wind data acquired within a short time interval has the potential to simultaneously obtain reasonable measurements of the wind radii and intensity parameters.