Land and ice applications of SeaWinds data

While originally designed for wind vector measurements over the ocean, past and present scatterometers have been demonstrated to be effective for large scale monitoring of the Earth´s land and ice surfaces. SeaWinds is the next generation of Ku-band scatterometers. The wide swath of SeaWinds enables much more frequent coverage of the Earth´s surface than has previously been possible. SeaWinds is already finding new practical land and ice applications. In this paper some sample land and ice results from SeaWinds on QuikScat are presented. These are based on applying the Scatterometer Image Reconstruction (SIR) algorithm to produce enhanced resolution σ⁰ images. Backscatter images with effective resolutions as fine as 4 km are possible using SeaWinds data. Images can be produced on much shorter time scales (1 day in the polar regions) than previously possible