An improved active/passive oceanic wind vector retrieval technique

This paper describes the advantages of combining passive and active microwave remote sensing observations for the purpose of ocean wind vectors retrievals. Previous studies have shown that a linear combination of horizontal and vertical polarized brightness temperatures contains a robust wind direction signal. In this paper, we present results from an end-to-end simulation of ocean measurements from a Ku-band (13.4 GHz) active/passive conical scanning satellite instrument. For this simulation, realistic wind fields from the NOAA National Center for Environmental Prediction (NCEP) numerical weather model were used to produce simultaneous brightness temperatures and radar backscatter measurements. These measurements were processed using a maximum likelihood estimation technique to yield ocean wind vector retrievals that were compared to NCEP fields. Results demonstrate significant improvements over simulated measurements for an active (radar scatterometer) sensor.