Several European institutions, as acknowledged by their logo’s in this report, agreed to collaborate on the tasks, agreements, commitments and services as set forth in an European proposal to work in collaboration with the planned Chinese efforts on the calibration and validation of the HY-2A scatterometer, led by Prof. Mingsen Lin, which proposal was agreed by NSOAS, for which latter the proposers are very grateful. During its execution the project team has been extended, in kind agreement with NSOAS, with scientists from the Portuguese Institute of the Sea and the Atmosphere (IPMA), the Italian Research Institute for Geo-Hydrological Protection (IRPI), the American Brigham Young University (BYU) and the German Weather Service (DWD), which activities in the project are subsequently reported and therefore fully acknowledged in this document. The approved European project further implied that backscatter and wind product were kindly made available by the Chinese National Satellite Ocean Application Service (NSOAS), which really form the basis of all activities described in this report. Moreover, the processing software for the HY-2B wind products is an update of the standard PenWP software, which has been established with NSOAS’ support, and is available on the website of the Numerical Weather Prediction Satellite Application Facility (NWP SAF) sponsored by EUMETSAT. The HY-2B data services that are being developed in the project and that are described in this report are supported by the EUMETSAT Ocean and Sea Ice (OSI) Satellite Application Facility (SAF). In addition, EUMETSAT and NSOAS set up new ground links to ground station Sodankylä in Finland, which will be essential for the nowcasting and Numerical Weather Prediction (NWP) applications in this report, as the timeliness of the HY-2B winds much determines the applicability of the geophysical data flow

With great interest we welcome the NSOAS HY-2B scatterometer, which favorably complements the METOP Advanced Scatterometer (ASCAT), the ISRO OceanSat-3 and ScatSat and Chinese-French Ocean Satellite (CFOSAT) scatterometers. Altogether, the international meteorological and oceanographic communities could expect to benefit of wind coverage from this virtual constellation at around 6:00, 7:00, 8:30, 9:30, 12:00, 18:00, 19:00, 20:30 21:30 and 24:00 Local Solar Time (LST), which is very useful for regional and coastal applications, but also for small-scale weather tracking, such as hurricanes, moist convection, and ocean forcing globally (Stoffelen et al., 2019). […]

Contributed International HY-2B Cal/Val results submitted to National Satellite Ocean Application Service (NSOAS).-- 72 pages, 45 figures, 7 tables

Peer reviewed