Evaluation of Oceansat-2-Derived Ocean Surface Winds Using Observations From Global Buoys and Other Scatterometers

Abstract

This paper describes the validation of ocean surface winds derived from Oceansat-2 Scatterometer (OSCAT) using global moored buoy observations and data from Advanced Scatterometer (ASCAT) and QuikSCAT (QSCAT) scatterometer. The analysis performed with the global in situ buoy data for the period of 9 months shows the root-mean-square error of around 1.5 m/s for the wind speed and around 20 <formula formulatype="inline" xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><tex Notation="TeX">$^{\circ}$</tex></formula> in the direction. The OSCAT and ASCAT data comparison also shows a high correlation with the difference of 1.5 m/s for the full range of winds and <formula formulatype="inline" xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><tex Notation="TeX">$\sim$</tex></formula> 1.2 m/s for the range 4–24 m/s.