Ec. Kent et al., A comparison of ship- and scatterometer-derived wind speed data in open ocean and coastal areas, INT J REMOT, 19(17), 1998, pp. 3361-3381
Quality controlled wind speed observations from merchant ships have been co
mpared with ERS-1 scatterometer data. The ship and satellite wind speed pai
rs were well correlated at 120km separation in the open ocean, reducing to
40km in the North Sea. The maximum allowed separation of ship and scatterom
eter wind speed pairs had to be further reduced to 20km in the North Sea to
avoid matching of coastal ship wind speed data with scatterometer data fro
m more exposed regions. Spurious biases in the comparisons were caused by t
he error variability of the scatterometer data (0.5 m s(-1)) being signific
antly less than that for the ships (2.0 m s(-1)). The unbiased regression w
as:
U-10n(ship)= 1.025 x U-10n(satellite)+ 0.255
No significant enhancement of the scatterometer wind speeds occurred in the
coastal region.