All-weather wind vector measurements from intercalibrated active and passive microwave satellite sensors

A summary of the strengths and weaknesses of passive (radiometers) versus active (scatterometer) wind retrievals is presented in Table 2. The radiometer provides a reliable rain detection and keeps better sensitivity at high wind speeds. Rain impacts scatterometer wind retrievals, especially at high winds. On the other hand, the scatterometer has significantly better sensitivity to wind direction than the radiometer especially in wind speeds below 6 m/s and in moderate or high rain. Daily gridded maps of the all-weather WindSat winds together with other WindSat products are available at www.remss.com from 2003 until current. The reprocessed QuikSCAT winds using the Ku2011 model function for the complete dataset (1999-2009) can be found on the same website.