Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute; Ministery Of Infrastructure And The Environment

Research
Sea Surface Winds / Scatterometer
A scatterometer is designed to measure the microwave backscatter from the wind-roughened ocean surface. Sophisticated processing results in high quality ocean vector wind fields. These are used in near real-time for, e.g., weather, wave and surge forecasting applications, but also in climate and oceanographic applications.

We work with scatterometers on board ERS (SCAT) from ESA, QuikSCAT (SeaWinds) from NASA/NOAA, MetOp (ASCAT), operated by EUMETSAT and OceanSat-2 (OSCAT) from ISRO. Our research and development activities are diverse and focus on (improvement of) the following aspects of the scatterometer data processing:
  • Geophysical Model Function
  • Inversion
  • Quality Control and Rain Flagging
  • Ice screening
  • Ambiguity Removal
  • Product Cal/Val and Monitoring
  • Data assimilation
  • Mesoscale analysis
  • Higher level products and applications
  • Future scatterometers
Acknowledgements
The work is carried out in the context of the EUMETSAT Numerical Weather Prediction Satellite Application Facility (NWP SAF), the EUMETSAT Ocean and Sea Ice Satellite Application Facility (OSI SAF), the Copernicus Marine Environment Monitoring Service (CMEMS) and smaller EU, ESA and EUMETSAT projects. The SeaWinds data are kindly provided by NASA JPL Physical Oceanography Distributed Active Archive Center (PO.DAAC) and by NOAA, the ERS data are provided by ESA and OSCAT data are gratefully received from ISRO.
Further information
Please contact Ad Stoffelen.
Near real time Wind Products
OSI SAF Wind Climate Data Records
Discontinued Wind Products
Software
R&D work
Projects
Related links