C‐band High and Extreme‐Force Speeds (CHEFS) ‐ Final Report

Global information on the motion near the ocean surface is generally lacking, limiting the physical modelling capabilities of the forcing of the world' s water surfaces by the atmosphere (Belmonte and Stoffelen, 2019). This also limits our knowledge of the exchange of momentum across the ocean‐atmosphere interface, affecting meteorological and ocean applications (Trindade et al., 2019). A particularly pressing requirement in the Ocean Surface Vector Wind (OSVW) community is to obtain reliable extreme winds in hurricanes (> 30 m s‐1) from wind scatterometers, since extreme wind, storm surge and wave forecasts for societal warning are a high priority in nowcasting as well as in Numerical Weather Prediction (NWP). [...]EUMETSAT supported the CHEFS study, which provided resources to KNMI, ICM and IFREMER to lead and progress on the ocean winds community issue of an in‐situ reference for satellite and model calibration of extreme winds. Such study is only possible with access to uniformly reprocessed wind data sets which were obtained from NOAA/NESDIS/STAR OSWT dropsondes and SFMR, ICOADS buoys, ECMWF buoy archive and ERA5 winds, ESA Sentinel‐1 SAR and RadarSat SAR VV and VH dataPeer reviewe