On the Use of S-1 Ocean Wind Measurements. What Can we Learn from ENVISAT/ASAR ?
Mouche, Alexis1; Longépé, Nicolas1; Hasager, Charlotte2; Badger, Merete2; Goacolou, Manuel1; Husson, Romain1
1CLS, FRANCE; 2DTU Wind Energy, DENMARK

Capitalizing on the significant amount of ENVISAT ASAR Wide Swath observations and anticipating the systematic production by ESA of high resolution ocean surface winds in the context of the upcoming Sentinel-1 mission, we will present how the potential of systematic acquisitions can be used to statistically describe wind resources in coastal areas. In particular, comparisons against in-situ data will be shown.
Recommendations about ocean surface wind processing scheme to be used will be presented:
- Because human activity is mainly focused in coastal areas, there are many echoes on the radar images due to offshore installations, wind farms or maritime traffic. They significantly corrupt the instantaneous wind measurements. We will show their impact on the statistics and will present pre-filtering methods to apply before the wind inversion to deal with it.
- The importance of correcting the signal from thermal noise before wind inversion will be shown and a methodology to evaluate and correct the data from it will be presented. - The importance of taking full advantage of the new radar capabilities such as the Doppler anomaly to better resolve the wind direction will be addressed.

Acknowledgements

This study has been funded by the European Comission under Norsewind project (TREN-FP7EN-219048), by ESA under SAR Ocean Wind-Waves and Currents: Upgrade of the SOPRANO Web-service project (n°4000103095/11/I-LG) and by CNES under Service Océano-meteo pour les Energies Marines Renouvelables (MARCHE 126894 CLS/CNES).