Timely Ers Scatterometer Winds for Weather Nowcasting

With the loss of the on-board ERS-2 tape recorders, ESA swiftly developed a new strategy for on-ground data acquisition. Rather than 14 ERS-2 data acquisitions per day, the acquisition rate has more than tripled, allowing data coverage in the North Atlantic and adjacent seas. Acquisition rate and coverage are still increasing. ESA processes all acquisitions independently, allowing user data access in typically 30 minutes. This is unprecedented for scatterometer winds and for the first time allows the use of the scatterometer winds for weather nowcasting. At KNMI, a procedure has been developed to provide onthe-fly unique scatterometer winds, i.e., swath overlaps are taken out, and incomplete Wind-Vector-Cells are combined for completion. As such, KNMI produces freely-available ERS-2 scatterometer wind products over the globe; see http://www.knmi.nl/scatterometer/ for further details.