A long term comparison between ERS-1 satellite data and numerical wind and wave model forecast results

For the three month period 1993 November 1-1994 January 31 the ERS-1 Fast Delivery Products provided by the wind scatterometer and the radar altimeter have been prepared for comparison with results of the numerical wave and surface wind forecast systems, running operationally under the responsibility of the Bundesamt für Seeschiffahrt und Hydrographie at the German Weather Service since June 1992. The comparisons between the altimeter recorded significant waveheights and the wave model values show in general a fairly good agreement. The patterns in the computed wind fields generally are confirmed by the scatterometer wind directions. The agreement between scatterometer derived data and model results is satisfactory in areas where a lot of meteorological in situ observations are available, but remarkable deviations are possible in rather data-sparse parts of the North Atlantic. The wind velocity and waveheight values obtained by scatterometer and altimeter are on average smaller than those computed by the models of the forecast system, especially in high wind