A NEAR-REAL-TIME Blended Sea-Surface Wind Product Based on Data from Multiple Satellites

A near-real-time version of the blended sea surface wind (BSSW) data product from multiple satellites, as well as the data processing method, and data accuracy analysis is introduced in this paper. The BSSW used sea surface winds provided by the virtual satellite constellation composed of HY-2 series satellites, Metop series satellites and DMSP series satellites as input. Error analysis, cross-calibration and 2D-Var processing is applied to blend these winds derived from different platform. With these methods, a near-real-time blended sea surface product with 6 hours interval and a spatial resolution of 25 kilometers is produced and released operationally by National Satellite Ocean Satellite Application Service. Comparing to buoy data, the RMSE is below 1.6 m/s for wind speed and below 18° for wind direction. While comparing to ERA5 data, the RMSE is below 1.3 m/s for wind speed and below 11° for wind direction. The validation results show that the BSSW is consistent with the buoy winds and ERA5 winds, indicating that BSSW can be of great importance to ocean and atmospheric numerical forecast model, marine disaster prevention and reduction, as well as scientific research on ocean.