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Examining the quality of CFOSAT-based surface winds over global oceans with respect to 111 buoys
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  • Yuxin Liu,
  • Xiangzhou Song,
  • Changsan Xu,
  • Chunlin Ning,
  • Yongliang Duan,
  • Shilin Tang,
  • Mingsen Lin,
  • Xingwei Jiang
Yuxin Liu
National Satellite Ocean Application Service, MNR
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Xiangzhou Song
Hohai University

Corresponding Author:[email protected]

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Changsan Xu
Key Laboratory of Marine Hazards Forecasting, Ministry of Natural Resources (MNR), Hohai University
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Chunlin Ning
First Institute of Oceanography, State Oceanic Administration
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Yongliang Duan
First Institute of Oceanography, State Oceanic Administration
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Shilin Tang
State Key Laboratory of Tropical Oceanography, South China Sea Institute of Oceanology, Chinese Academy of Sciences
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Mingsen Lin
National Satellite Ocean Application Service, China
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Xingwei Jiang
National Satellite Ocean Application Service, Ministry of Natural Resources
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Abstract

The China-France Oceanography Satellite (CFOSAT), launched on 29 October 2018, is the world’s first satellite that carries both a real aperture radar spectrometer and a fan-shaped beam rotary scanning scatterometer. This study examined the retrieval results for the scatterometer onboard the CFOSAT with respect to global buoys from NDBC, TAO/TRITON, PIRATA, RAMA, PMEL, and MNR in 2019. For the scatterometer products in the range of 4-24 ms-1, the root-mean-square error (RMSE) of the wind speed was 1.1 ms-1, and the wind direction RMSE was 20.4{degree sign} at the global scale. In the tropics, the wind speed and wind direction RMSEs were 1.1 ms-1 and 21.5{degree sign}, respectively, while the corresponding RMSEs decreased to 1.1 ms-1 and 18.8{degree sign} in the subtropics. The error statistics were larger in the range of 0-4 ms-1, which is beyond the designed measurement accuracy, and the wind speed was overestimated. Overall, the CFOSAT measurements are reliable in the range of 4-24 ms-1, thus meeting the accuracy requirements of the technical design. Finally, the influence of surface currents on the CFOSAT measurements was analyzed. The results indicate that the differences between the CFOSAT measurements and buoy observations in the tropics were reduced by excluding the effect of the surface currents.