ASCAT Full Resolution Backscatter Product
Anderson, Craig¹; Figa-Saldana, Julia¹; Bonekamp, Hans¹; Wilson, JJW²; Duff, Colin^1
1EUMETSAT, GERMANY; ²e, GERMANY

The Advanced Scatterometer (ASCAT) on Metop series of satellites is a six beam, real aperture, C-band radar using vertical polarisation. It is designed to accurately measure surface backscatter allowing the operational retrieval of global ocean winds. The data it provides is also used by a number of other applications including sea ice monitoring and soil moisture retrieval.

Three types of level 1b products are produced at EUMETSAT. Two of these, the SZO and SZR products, contain triplets of averaged backscatter values on a regular grid of lat/longs. The third product, SZF, contains geolocated full resolution backscatter values. These products are distributed in near real time via EUMETCAST and are also available from the EUMETSAT Data Centre.

We describe the latest version of the SZF product which has been enhanced to make it easier to use and more compact. It also contains a regular grid of points with a spacing of around 6.25 km, which is consistent with the grid points in the SZO and SZR products. We also present an analysis of the full resolution data, showing the typical results that can be obtained when it is spatially averaged for various applications.