A preliminary assessment of the sea surface wind speed production of HY-2 scanning microwave radiometer

A scanning microwave radiometer (RM) was launched on August 16, 2011, on board HY-2 satellite. The six-month long global sea surface wind speeds observed by the HY-2 scanning microwave radiometer are preliminarily validated using in-situ measurements and WindSat observations, respectively, from January to June 2012. The wind speed root-mean-square (RMS) difference of the comparisons with in-situ data is 1.89 m/s for the measurements of NDBC and 1.72 m/s for the recent four-month data measured by PY30-1 oil platform, respectively. On a global scale, the wind speeds of HY-2 RM are compared with the sea surface wind speeds derived from WindSat, the RMS difference of 1.85 m/s for HY-2 PM collocated observations data set is calculated in the same period as above. With analyzing the global map of a mean difference between HY-2 RM and WindSat, it appears that the bias of the sea surface wind speed is obviously higher in the inshore regions. In the open sea, there is a relatively higher positive bias in the mid-latitude regions due to the overestimation of wind speed observations, while the wind speeds are underestimated in the Southern Ocean by HY-2 RM relative to WindSat observations.