Ocean Surface Wind Speed Retrieval for SWOT Ka-band Radar Interferometer

The Surface Water and Ocean Topography (SWOT) mission is a collaboration between NASA and CNES that measures water extent, surface heights, and river slopes for inland water bodies and sea surface height (SSH), wind speed, and significant wave height (SWH) over open ocean. SWOT was launched on Dec. 15, 2022 and is currently operational. In this paper we discuss the algorithm for retrieving ocean surface wind speed from backscatter measurements obtained from the SWOT Ka-band Radar Interferometer (KaRIn). We validate that algorithm by comparing the retrieved wind speed to collocated measurements from the ASCAT ocean wind scatterometer onboard ESA’s MetOP-B and -C satellites.