Performance Assessment of Cygnss High Wind Retrieval for the Improved EIRP Calibration

The CYGNSS Level 2 wind speed retrieval will be updated to a newer version within the next few months. These updates are based on accurate measurements of the Normalised Bistatic Radar Cross-Section (NBRCS) using the improved estimates of the Effective Isotropic Radiated Power (EIRP) of the GPS along the direction of the specular point. This calibration will result in considerable increase in the number of measurement samples (~37% more) by including the block IIF GPS measurements which were previously filtered out due to poor estimation of its antenna gain patterns. In this work the new Level 2 CYGNSS winds will be matched to HWRF hurricane simulated winds for major hurricanes from 2017 and 2018 and their performance will be assessed using different figures of merit. Additional intelligent quality control filters are also planned to be developed that will improve the quality of the CYGNSS data product for reliable operational purposes.