Characterizing Tropospheric Winds by Combining MISR Cloud-Track and QuikSCAT Surface Wind Vectors

Numerous studies have found that the inclusion of wind observations results in a significantly greater improvement in operational weather forecasts compared to the addition of temperature or pressure observations alone. However, global tropospheric wind measurements are only available from 12-hourly rawinsonde launches from selected locations, primarily over land. For years the world's oceans were "data voids" in terms of wind measurements. Only recently have satellites begun to fill this gap. The SeaWinds scatterometer on the QuikSCAT satellite obtains winds referenced to 10 meters above the surface over the global oceans under nearly all weather conditions. The wind speed and direction data from QuikSCAT have been extensively tested against surface observations and are of such quality that these data are routinely assimilated into numerical weather prediction models run by both the National Center for Environmental Prediction (NCEP) and the European Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasting (ECMWF). However, scatterometer data only provide wind information near the ocean surface. This information can be complemented with satellite cloud-track winds that provide information about winds in the free troposphere over the ocean, as well as over land, where scatterometer data are not available. In particular, the height resolved cloud motion vectors from the Multi-angle Imaging SpectroRadiometer (MISR) instrument on the NASA EOS Terra satellite yield wind speeds for clouds at altitudes less than approximately 2.5 km that are shown to compare favorably with the QuikSCAT winds globally. In addition, the direction of the MISR winds is similar to the QuikSCAT wind vectors when compared on the same basis. The synergistic use of these two sets of wind observations has the potential to make possible a variety of new studies: from improved forecast and climate model validation; to increased understanding of tropospheric water vapor transport; to observations of the coupling between the ocean surface and lower atmosphere in a variety of conditions, such as during strong El Nino or La Nina events.