Coastal Winds from NOAA Near Real-Time SCATSAT-1 Scatterometer Processor

The NOAA Operational SCATSAT-I scatterometer ocean surface wind products are produced at a 12.5-25 km resolution. While they provide invaluable data over the open ocean, the wind retrievals stop short of providing any useful wind data near the coast. In order to retrieve winds in coastal zones, an enhanced resolution and land contamination removal algorithm has been developed. We show that the land contamination removal alone is not enough to get the wind retrievals closer than 15-25 km from the coast. In this paper, we develop a land contamination correction approach to get the winds closer to the coast. Together with a post wind retrieval processing we manage to retrieve winds up to 2.5 km from the coast. The coastal wind speeds are validated against NWP model winds for the U.S. Northeastern coastal zone. The performance shows a mean bias of -0.2m/s and standard deviation of 2.9 m/s, which are comparable to the performance of the enhanced resolution open ocean wind product from the SCATSAT-I.