ABSTRACT
Observations of sea surface wind field are critical for typhoon prediction. The scatterometer observation is one of the most important sources of sea surface winds, which provides both wind speed and wind direction information. However, the spatial resolution of scatterometer wind is low. Synthetic aperture radar can provide a more detailed wind structure of the tropical cyclone. In addition, the cross-polarization observation of SAR can provide more detailed information of high-speed wind (>25 m s−1) than the scatterometer. Nevertheless, due to the narrow swath of SAR, the number of retrieved sea surface wind data used in the data assimilation is limited, and another limitation of SAR wind observation is that it does not provide true wind direction information. In this chapter, the joint assimilation of the Advanced Scatterometer (ASCAT) wind and Sentinel-1 SAR wind was investigated. Another limitation in the current operational typhoon prediction is the inefficient quality control (QC) method used in the data assimilation since a large number of high-speed wind observations was rejected by the traditional Gaussian distribution QC. We introduce the Huber norm distribution quality control into the data assimilation successfully. Finally, a numerical simulation experiment is presented.
