Ocean surface winds measurement using reflected GNSS signals

Signals of the Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) can be used for purposes rather than navigation, positioning and timing. Direct GNSS signals have already been used to obtain the earth´s atmospheric profile. Now it has been recognized that the reflected GNSS signals can also be used to obtain ocean surface wind speed and direction. Based on the aircraft flight experiments taken in China, this paper presents a thorough and extended analysis of this surface wind retrieval algorithm. In order to verify the accuracy of the retrieval algorithm, the retrieval results have been compared with QuickSCAT satellite´s ocean surface winds sounding results. The retrieval accuracies of wind vectors are 2m/s wind speed and 2 deg wind direction.