Evaluation of sea surface high wind speed inversion method using joint satellite radar altimeter and radiometer data

Based on the Jason series satellite data from 2002 to 2020, the wind speed information of 431 hurricanes was obtained by using a high wind speed calculation method. On this basis, the best track data sets of hurricanes in the Atlantic and Northeast Pacific of the United States hurricane center based on reanalysis are compared and analyzed, and the high wind speed calculation method is comprehensively evaluated. The calculation and evaluation results show that the wind speed RMSE of 8.03−66.93 m/s hurricane is better than 4 m/s; the correlation coefficient between satellite wind speed and NHC hurricane best path data is above 0.9. This shows that the method in this paper is reliable and has the ability to observe the high wind speed of tropical cyclone. At the same time, the analysis results in the paper show that the hurricane observation period is almost accompanied by different degrees of rainfall. When the wind speed is greater than 50 m/s, the satellite observation points are in the moderate to heavy rain environment. The research in this paper proves the feasibility of using satellite radar altimeter and calibration radiometer to jointly obtain wind speed information in extreme marine environment, which provides a potential technical means for improving the wind speed observation ability of typhoon or hurricane. In addition, the statistical results show that there is also a good correlation between wind speed and pressure during the hurricane. This relationship can be used to quickly calculate the central pressure of tropical cyclone based on the high wind speed information obtained by satellite, which will form the satellite’s ability to synchronously acquire the wind speed and central pressure of tropical cyclone.