Consolidation of quality control procedures for scatterometers

With the advent of the golden era of scatterometry, with seven scatterometers currently operating in orbit and a few others to be launched in the near future, a wide variety of scientific and operational applications will certainly benefit from consolidated wind retrieval procedures. In particular, an important component of the scatterometer wind processing is the quality control (QC) procedure. Over the last two decades, several QC indicators have been developed for C-band and Ku-band scatterometers, and used in the operational generation of sea surface wind products. Such indicators mostly aim at identifying and filtering retrieved wind quality degradation due to high wind variability and/or rain contamination effects. As such, the different QC indicators may be applied for different oceanographic and meteorological applications. The methods will be presented at the conference to motivate a discussion on their application-dependent use and come up with a consolidated view from the different user communities