Recent work has shown that, in contrast to global numerical weather prediction models, space-borne scatterometers are able to resolve the increased wind variability near convection areas. This unique capability is essential for climate applications, since wind variability directly impacts air-sea fluxes and, as such, air-sea interaction. In the present work westudyocean winds in heavy rain events occurring in Mesoscale Convective Systems (MCSs) in the Tropical Atlantic using ocean winds measured a short time apart at the same latitude and longitude.This is made possible by the ASCAT tandem mission (ASCAT-A and ASCAT-B pass over the tropics with overlapping swaths and a time difference of 50 minutes) and Meteosat Second Generation (MSG) precipitation time series (every 15 minutes) collocated with the ASCAT-A and B collocations.. We show that the ASCAT derived surface divergence and vorticity fields contain small scale structures with large spatial gradients (conveniently characterized using Singularity Analysis) which we interpret as strong updraft and downdraft events.The strength of these events varies in response to the precipitation. Our objective is to quantify this change and to compare with similar results obtained for ECMWF background and 2DVAR analysis winds

2016 European Space Agency (ESA) Living Planet Symposium, 9-13 May 2016, Prague, Czech Republic

Peer Reviewed