A Land-Corrected ASCAT Coastal Wind Product

Abstract

A new ASCAT coastal wind product based on a 12.5 km grid size is presented. The new product contains winds up to the coast line and is identical to the current operational coastal product over the open ocean. It is based on the assumption that within a wind vector cell land and sea have constant radar cross section. With an accurate land fraction calculated from ASCAT’s spatial response function and a detailed land mask, the land correction can be obtained with a simple linear regression. The coastal winds stretch all the way to the coast, filling the coastal gap in the operational coastal ASCAT product, resulting in three times more winds within a distance of 20 km from the coast. The Quality Control (QC), based on the regression error and the regression bias error, reduces this abundance somewhat. A comparison of wind speed pdfs with those from NWP forecasts shows that the influence of land in the land-corrected scatterometer product appears more reasonable and starts not as far offshore as that in the NWP forecasts. The VRMS difference with moored buoys increases slightly from about 2.4 m/s at 20 km or more from the coast to 4.2 m/s at less than 5 km, where coastal wind effects clearly contribute to the latter difference. While the QC based on the regression bias error flags many WVCs that compare well with buoys, the land-corrected coastal product with more abundant coastal winds appears useful for nowcasting and other coastal wind applications.