A Comparison between COWVR and WindSat Measurements for NOAA’s Applications

The Compact Ocean Wind Vector Radiometer (COWVR) and WindSat are two fully polarimetric microwave radiometers that are designed to measure ocean surface vector winds (OSVW). In this paper, a comparison between the COWVR and WindSat common fully polarimetric channels will be presented. The main focus is to analyze the sensitivity of COWVR measured Stokes parameters (3
^rd
and 4
^th
Stokes at 18.7 and 34 GHz) to multiple surface and atmospheric parameters and compare them to their WindSat counterparts (3
^rd
and 4
^th
Stokes 18.7 and 37 GHz). Approximately 2000 randomly selected orbits of COWVR and WindSat were used in the analyses along with modeled geophysical parameters from the Global Data Assimilation System (GDAS) 0.25° resolution product. Preliminary results show that COWVR Stokes measurements exhibits strong wind vector signature comparable to that of WindSat.