Application of sea surface wind products in global atmospheric assimilation from HY-2 scatterometer: Preliminary results

Abstract The sea surface wind products retrieved from HY-2 scatterometer have become better over time, and it has contributed significantly to the development of forecasting abilities. This article compares the sea surface wind products obtained from HSCAT with buoy winds from NDBC during long time series to validate the results, and uses the global MPAS-GSI with unstructured spherical grids for assimilating and forecasting. The observation errors employed in this study are 2.5m s -1 since the greatest RMSEs of the u- and v-component are less than 1.7m s -1 . The simulations with or without assimilation are analysed and validated with ERA5 reanalysis in several selected locations, proving that assimilating HSCAT wind products can indeed enhance the forecast skill of surface wind.