Hurricane and Typhoon Storm Wind Resolving NOAA NCEI Blended Sea Surface Wind (NBS) Product Frontiers in Marine Science

Improving forecasts of storms and hurricanes and their potential impacts is highly important to public safety, economic security, commerce, and community infrastructure. One key element of forecast improvement is more accurate and increased spatial–time coverage of observational data for model calibration, quality control and initialization, and/or data assimilation. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has been producing a global gridded 0.25° and 6-hourly sea surface winds product that has wide applications in marine transportation, marine ecosystem and fisheries, offshore winds, weather and ocean forecasts, and other areas. The NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI) Blended Sea winds (NBS) v1.0 product is generated by blending observations from multiple sources (satellites), including scatterometers and microwave radiometers/imagers. However, these sensors do not provide accurate observations of intensive high-speed hurricane winds because their signals saturate in very high winds or degrade in the presence of rain. Recent advancements in satellite wind retrievals revealed that the L-band (1.42 GHz) instrument on the Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP) satellite and the AMSR2 All-Weather channel (~6.9 GHz) can provide accurate hurricane winds of up to 65 m/s (145 MPH) without being affected by rain; these data are incorporated in a new version of the Blended Sea Winds, NBS v2.0, using a multi-sensor data fusion technique based on random errors, enabling it to resolve very high winds, especially along the eyewalls of tropical cyclones and hurricanes. NBS v2.0 provides both a long-term record of 30+ years retrospectively since July 1987 and a near-real-time mode with 1-day latency.