Hurricane wind field estimation from seawinds at ultra high resolution

Although SeaWinds was not originally designed to observe tropical cyclones, new higher resolution products resolve much of the horizontal structure of these storms. However, these higher resolution products (reported at 2.5 km) are inherently noisier than the standard 25 km products and the high rain rates often associated with hurricanes corrupt the wind estimates. Fortunately, these storms have structure which can be exploited using a model. This paper develops a new procedure for hurricane wind field estimation from the SeaWinds instrument at ultra high resolution. We develop a simplified hurricane model to provide prior information to be used in maximum a posteriori probability (MAP) wind estimation. Using the hurricane model ameliorates the effects of rain and noise on the scatterometer measurements and directly provides useful hurricane parameters such as the eye center location and intensity.