Review of Recent Climate Conditions and Forecasts
Abstract

Abstract Author: Sarah Levinson, Wanqiu Wang, and Pingping Xie

Abstract Title: Oceanic Surface Wind in Satellite Retrievals, NCEP Reanalyses, GFS, and CFS

Abstract: Seasonal and annual climatology of 10m surface wind is examined for the five sets of NCEP operational products, including GDAS, CDAS, CDAS2, GFS and CFS through comparisons with satellite observations. Comparisons are first performed among four satellite-based wind data sets (JPL QuikScat wind, RSS QuikScat wind, RSS SSM/I wind, and the NCDC blended wind fields) and FSU in situ winds to provide insight on the magnitude of uncertainty of the observations. The standard deviation among the four satellite products is found to be minimal. The mean of the Quikscat winds and SSMI winds are then utilized as reference to examine the oceanic surface wind fields in the NCEP operational products. Results show that large scale circulation patterns of the time mean wind are reproduced fairly well by all the NCEP products, especially GDAS, although there are some systematic differences. Specifically, CDAS1 is too slow in the tropics and CDAS2 is too fast in the mid-latitudes. In some months, GFS wind is too strong in the eastern equatorial Pacific which is associated with the cold sea surface temperature bias in the CFS forecast.