Application of Space-borne scatterometer in typhoon center location and intensity estimation

Spaceborne scatterometers are important sensors for measuring global ocean surface wind fields data. However, their coarse spatial resolution and the saturation of co-polarized backscatter signals under high sea states limit their application in typhoon center and intensity estimation. Based on 92 typhoon samples measured by the Advanced Scatterometer (ASCAT) in the Northwest Pacific Ocean in 2023, this paper establishes an algorithm model (ASCAT-TICE) for typhoon intensity and center estimation. The model is validated by using the International Best Track Archive for Climate Stewardship (IBTrACS) dataset. The results show that the ASCAT original ocean surface winds are significantly underestimate typhoon intensities, with a bias of 14.73 m/s when compared with IBTrACS reports. However, the corrected ASCAT ocean winds demonstrated an excellent performance in typhoon intensity estimation when compared with IBTrACS data, with the root mean square error (RMSE) of 7.89 m/s and bias of 3.85 m/s. In terms of typhoon center location, our method can effectively estimate typhoon center locations from ASCAT"s coarse-resolution ocean wind products, with the RMSEs of 0.41° for longitude and 0.45° for latitude, respectively. Results demonstrated that typhoon center estimation accuracy are better than two ASCAT grid cells. This study proves the capability of ASCAT scatterometers in typhoon center and intensity estimation, which significantly enhancing the application of spaceborne scatterometer wind data in typhoon measurements and forecasting operations. Our model also provides technical support for other operational scatterometers in typhoon measurements.