Newsletter #5

One of the key meteorological parameters for weather forecasting, meteorological studies and climate applications is wind. It is therefore a major task for the science and operational communities to exploit the backscatter data from scatterometers in order to derive ocean vector winds (OVW). Herewith we announce a face-to-face IOVWST meeting, following virtual meetings in November 2023. The objectives for the face-to-face meeting follow the objectives of the CGMS Ocean Surface Winds (OSW) Task Group (TG) on OVW product intercalibration, consolidation and standardization for user convenience.

In the context of the OSI SAF Visiting Scientist Program, Evgeniia Makarova from the Institut de Ciències del Mar (ICM - CSIC) in Barcelona, worked on the implementation and validation of a number of Machine Learning (ML) algorithms that predict ERA5 sea surface wind biases based on several input parameters related to ocean and atmospheric processes, mostly available from NWP output. The work demonstrates the feasibility to predict ERA5 local biases, mainly using information based only on other NWP variables. Find out more in the story.

In the context of the OSI SAF Visiting Scientist Activities Program, Hoyeon Shi from Seoul National University (SNU) in South Korea, worked on generating Arctic snow depth and sea ice thickness dataset by combining CryoSat-2, AMSR, and AVHRR measurements. The main objective was to produce a daily snow depth and sea ice thickness dataset from satellite measurements to support the evaluation of the Snow Microwave Radiative Transfer model (SMRT). The comparison showed that there was good consistency between the retrievals and the validation datasets. Read the full story here.

In the context of the OSI SAF Visiting Scientist Activities (VSA) Program, Roberto Saldo from the Technical University of Denmark (DTU) in Lyngby, Denmark, worked on the implementation of a new validation methodology for the OSI SAF sea ice concentration (SIC) climate data records (CDRs) and the validation of the OSI SAF SIC CDRs version 3. The work has led to the setup of a new and more suitable validation methodology for the OSI SAF SIC CDRs. Read about it in this story.