Estimating Wind Stress at the Ocean Surface From Scatterometer Observations

Wind stress is the most important ocean forcing for driving tropical surface currents. Stress can be estimated from scatterometer-reported wind measurements at 10 m that have been extrapolated to the surface, assuming a neutrally stable atmosphere and no surface current. Scatterometer calibration is...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:IEEE geoscience and remote sensing letters 2013-09, Vol.10 (5), p.1129-1132
Main Authors: Ali, M. M., Bhat, G. S., Long, D. G., Bharadwaj, S., Bourassa, M. A.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Artificial neural networks
Atmospheric stability
Estimates
Estimating
Marine
Meteorology
Neural networks
neutral stability
Ocean currents
Ocean surface
Ocean temperature
Radar measurements
scatterometer
Scatterometers
Sea measurements
Sea surface
Stress
Stresses
Studies
Wind
Wind measurement
wind stress
Citations: Items that this one cites
Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:Wind stress is the most important ocean forcing for driving tropical surface currents. Stress can be estimated from scatterometer-reported wind measurements at 10 m that have been extrapolated to the surface, assuming a neutrally stable atmosphere and no surface current. Scatterometer calibration is designed to account for the assumption of neutral stability; however, the assumption of a particular sea state and negligible current often introduces an error in wind stress estimations. Since the fundamental scatterometer measurement is of the surface radar backscatter (sigma-0) which is related to surface roughness and, thus, stress, we develop a method to estimate wind stress directly from the scatterometer measurements of sigma-0 and their associated azimuth angle and incidence angle using a neural network approach. We compare the results with in situ estimations and observe that the wind stress estimations from this approach are more accurate compared with those obtained from the conventional estimations using 10-m-height wind measurements.
ISSN:1545-598X
1558-0571
DOI:10.1109/LGRS.2012.2231937