Improving the Quikscat Derived Winds Near the Coast

• Published in: IGARSS 2022 - 2022 IEEE International Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium pp. 6919 - 6922
• Main Authors: Grieco, G., Portabella, M., Stoffelen, A., Vogeltang, J., Verhoef, A.
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Published: IEEE 17.07.2022
• Subjects: Coastal winds; Estimation; Geoscience and remote sensing; Land Contribution Ratio; Normalized Radar Cross Section noise; QuikSCAT; Radar cross-sections; Satellites; Sea measurements; Sea surface
• ISSN: 2153-7003
• DOI: 10.1109/IGARSS46834.2022.9884598

This paper describes some preliminary steps to improve the coastal winds retrieved from the Seawinds scatterometer on-board the QuikSCAT satellite platform. In particular, it describes a method for estimating the slice Normalized Radar Cross Section ( \sigma_{0} ) noise. Moreover, it shows a simple method for selecting the best-suited \sigma_{0} domain to implement a Land Contribution Ratio (LCR) based \sigma_{0} correction scheme. The preliminary results suggest that there are some non-negligible differences between the open sea and the "every kind of surface" noise characteristics, even if such differences are not reported in the QuikSCAT files. The intra-egg \sigma_{0} biases may amount to approximately ±0.6 dB for H-Pol acquisitions and half that for V-Pol, but the impact on the noise estimation amounts to less than 2%. Finally, the LCR-based \sigma_{0} correction scheme is now being tested and developed in the linear domain.