Estimating Tropical Cyclone Wind Structure and Intensity From Spaceborne Radiometer and Synthetic Aperture Radar

Details

• Journal Title:
  IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Applied Earth Observations and Remote Sensing
• Personal Author:
  Zhang, Biao ; Zhu, Ziqiang ; Perrie, William ; Tang, Jie ; Zhang, Jun A.
• NOAA Program & Office:
  OAR (Oceanic and Atmospheric Research) ; AOML (Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratory) ; CIMAS (Cooperative Institute for Marine and Atmospheric Studies)
• Description:
  We present a relatively simple method to estimate tropical cyclone (TC) surface wind structure (34-, 50-, and 64-kt wind radii) and intensity [maximum wind speed (MWS)] from wind fields acquired from the L-band SMAP radiometer and C-band Sentinel-1A/B and RADARSAT-2 synthetic aperture radar (SAR) between 2015 and 2020. The radiometer and SAR-derived wind radii and MWS are systematically compared with the best-track estimates. The root-mean-square errors (RMSEs) of R34, R50, and R64 are 31.2, 21.8, and 17.0 nmi (1 nmi = 1.852 km) for radiometer, and 21.7, 16.5, and 16.3 nmi for SAR, respectively. These error values are smaller than the averaged best-track uncertainty estimates for the three wind radii. Compared with the best-track reports, the bias and RMSE for the MWS estimates are −0.2 m/s and 5.8 m/s for radiometer, and 4.4 m/s and 9.1 m/s for SAR, respectively. These results are for the wind speeds in the range of 17–80 m/s. For the two typical TCs (Lionrock and Noru) in the Northwest Pacific Ocean, our results show that a combination of the radiometer and SAR wind data acquired within a very short time interval has the potential to simultaneously obtain reasonable measurements of the wind radii and intensity parameters. Moreover, for a TC with a long lifecycle, such as Typhoon Noru, we demonstrate that the high-resolution and multitemporal synergistic observations from SAR and radiometer are valuable for studying fine-scale features of the wind field and characteristics of wind asymmetry associated with intensity change, as well as the evolution of TC surface wind structure and intensity.
• Keywords:
  Cyclones—Tropics
• Source:
  IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Applied Earth Observations and Remote Sensing, 14, 4043-4050
• DOI:
  https://doi.org/10.1109/JSTARS.2021.3065866
• Document Type:
  Journal Article
• Place as Subject:
  North Pacific Ocean
• Rights Information:
  CC BY
• Compliance:
  Submitted
• Main Document Checksum:
  urn:sha256:9fdeff8543178e95e6a76c77fbcb690d8bea1a5ebff7461d7a00de0acf794636
• Download URL:
  https://repository.library.noaa.gov/view/noaa/29673/noaa_29673_DS1.pdf
• File Type:
  [PDF - 3.17 MB ]