Research of sea surface gust inversion by dual band radar altimeter data

Sea surface gusts are important marine dynamic environmental information required for the development of marine resources, marine disaster prevention and reduction, and marine scientific research. However, so far, there has been a serious lack of observational data on sea surface gusts, which has hindered the development of gust forecasting, application research, and other aspects. This article uses the backscatter coefficients in the C and Ku bands of the dual frequency HY-2B satellite altimeter to correct the existing sea surface wind speed (gust wind speed (U_g U₁₀) and) inversion algorithm. The inversion results were verified for authenticity with the buoy data from the National Buoy Data Center (NDBC) of the United States from 2018 to 2022. The correlation coefficient (R) was 0.91, and the root mean square error (RMSE) was 1.82 m/s; based on the inversion results of this method and the NDBC station data from 2018 to 2022, the RMSE of similar foreign satellites Jason-3 is superior to the conventional 2 m/s accuracy requirement; the inversion results were verified with individual cases of offshore and oceanic stations at different latitudes, and the RMSE was better than 2 m/s. Therefore, based on the existing HY-2B satellite altimeter sea surface wind speed observation data, this article uses different band information to achieve observation of sea surface gusts, which has high observation accuracy. Meanwhile, this method is also applicable to foreign satellite altimeters with the same observation system.