Publishers version - DTU Orbit
Publishers version - DTU Orbit
Publishers version - DTU Orbit
Create successful ePaper yourself
Turn your PDF publications into a flip-book with our unique Google optimized e-Paper software.
winds from 10 m to 100 m, relevant for wind turbine hub heights. Furevik et al. (2011) used<br />
eight years of QuikSCAT for wind resource mapping in the Mediterranean Sea, concluding<br />
that the satellite observations are valuable for the first phase of wind farm planning, e.g.<br />
during the identification of promising sites.<br />
Karagali et al. (2012) used the 10-year long QuikSCAT L3 product from RSS to study<br />
the seasonal 10 m wind characteristics in the North Sea and the Baltic Sea. They reported<br />
higher spatial variability of the mean wind speed in the North Sea compared to the Baltic<br />
Sea. Regarding the spatially coherent nature of the L3 product, they used the location of an<br />
offshore met. mast to calculate the spatial correlation between the grid cell containing the<br />
mast and all other grid cells. Correlation coefficients higher than 0.9 were reported for an area<br />
covering ∼4% of the North Sea.<br />
QuikSCAT winds have been used for data assimilation in atmospheric and oceanic models.<br />
Comparisons between QuikSCAT and Numerical Weather Prediction (NWP) model reanalysis<br />
from NCEP/NCAR performed by Kolstad (2008), showed a 0.9 correlation of daily and<br />
monthly mean wind speeds. Root mean square (RMS) differences were 1.1–1.81 m s −1 for<br />
the daily and 0.75–1.00 m s −1 for the monthly means. Ruti et al. (2008) reported a lower<br />
accuracy of modelled winds compared to buoy data than that of QuikSCAT compared to the<br />
same buoy data in the Mediterranean Sea.<br />
Karagali et al. (2013) compared the QuikSCAT L3 RSS product with modelled winds and<br />
found biases up to 1 m s −1 in the North Sea. Using the intra annual wind indices, they studied<br />
the temporal wind variability and concluded that QuikSCAT captures the wind variability and<br />
its amplitude as observed from 10-minute measurements at an offshore location in the North<br />
Sea. Modelled winds captured the overall seasonal trends but discrepancies were identified in<br />
the amplitude of the wind index and the wind variability.<br />
16.7 Spatial Resolution of Scatterometer Winds<br />
The effective spatial resolution of scatterometer winds has been examined through their spectral<br />
properties. Vogelzang et al. (2011) used QuikSCAT and ASCAT products with different<br />
characteristics, along with ECMWF model forecasts and buoy measurements to evaluate the<br />
quality of the scatterometer winds, concluding that the ASCAT-25 km product contains more<br />
intermediate scale information than the QuikSCAT product processed at the Royal NetherlandsMeteorologicalInstitute(KNMI).Theadvantagesofthescatterometerspatialresolution<br />
compared to modelled wind fields have been studied using ERS (Chin et al., 1998; Halpern<br />
et al., 1999) and QuikSCAT (Zecchetto and De Biasio, 2003; Stoffelen et al., 2010).<br />
Recently, Karagali (2012) examined the spectral properties of the ENVISAT ASAR winds<br />
of varying resolutions and RSS L3 (v3) QuikSCAT winds. A significant advantage of the SAR<br />
winds processed with the same resolution as QuikSCAT (25 km) was observed indicating the<br />
ability of SAR winds to resolve more small scale variability.<br />
16.8 Contemporary Scatterometers<br />
So far, emphasis on QuikSCAT has been given due to its unique mission lifetime which ended<br />
in 2009, after 10 years of operation. Currently, ASCAT is the longer available scatterometer<br />
in orbit. It is a C-band instrument onboard the platforms MetOp-A (operational since 2007)<br />
and MetOp-B (operational since April 2013). Due to its C-band nature, operating at 5.255<br />
GHz with a longer wavelength, ASCAT is much less sensitive to rain compared to Ku band<br />
instruments like QuikSCAT. Because of this, C-band instruments are also less responsive to<br />
very small changes of the surface roughness.<br />
At an altitude of 837 km, ASCAT has a 500 km wide swath on each side of the platform<br />
ground track. An example from an ASCAT wind retrieval is shown in Figure 203. The<br />
data are obtained from the coastal product developed at KNMI (http://www.knmi.nl/<br />
scatterometer/ascat_osi_co_prod/ascat_app.cgi).Themissingdata intheNorthSea<br />
are due to the nadir gap.Note the high resolution features, showing an area of high winds<br />
304 <strong>DTU</strong> Wind Energy-E-Report-0029(EN)