CERSAT

Ocean winds and extreme events

Wind measurement from passive and active spaceborne sensors such as SAR, scatterometer or altimeter, or L-Band radiometer is a major research topic at Ifremer/LOPS, with a strong involvement into related ESA or CNES missions such as ERS, Sentinel-1 series, CFOSAT and SMOS, , and dedicated products and services with a particular focus on extreme events (tropical and extratropical cyclone).

Ocean winds at Ifremer / LOPS

Research and development activities on measuring wind from satellite mostly targets the following areas :

  • development and validation of processing algorithms for wind retrieval from SAR (Sentinel-1 series), scatterometer and altimeters or L-band radiometer (SMOS).
  • support to cal/val and long-term monitoring of existing missions
  • development of methodologies to blend multimission datasets providing higher spatial and temporal resolution such as the blended L4 product produced for Copernicus Marine Service (CMEMS) project
  • reprocessing of consistent long time series, such as for SMOSWind project

Science products

In particular CERSAT delivers:

  • along-swath and gridded surface wind oberservation from SMOS L-band radiometer specially suited for high speed wind
  • long time series of blended multi-mission products (Level 4) such as the one developed for MAXSS or Copernicus Marine Service (CMEMS)
  • an atlas of multi-sensor observations over tropical cyclones, extra-tropical storms and polar lows for a large range of geophysical variables