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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)

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