Performance and Characterization of CYGNSS Wind Speed Products

The NASA Cyclone Global Navigation Satellite System (CYGNSS) mission generates several ocean surface wind speed data products. Level 2 products are sampled in time and space as the measurements are made by each individual satellite in the constellation. Due to the nature of GNSS-R measurements, the sampling is essentially a single pixel-wide swath along the specular point (SP) track on the Earth surface. However, the large number of satellites and their low orbit inclination angle result in dense spatial coverage and frequent revisit rates in the tropics when measurements are aggregated together. Standard Level 3 wind products combine measurements by the full constellation which are then gridded in space and averaged over one hour. A new Level 3 storm-centric gridded wind speed product is reported on a finer spatial grid every 6 hours to better resolve storm structure throughout its lifecycle. Spatial and temporal sampling properties, as well as wind speed uncertainties, are presented here for each of the CYGNSS ocean surface wind speed products.