CYGNSS data and H*Wind surface wind analysis: A data denial experiment

The Cyclone Global Navigation Satellite System, or CYGNSS, is a planned constellation of micro-satellites that utilizes existing GPS satellites to retrieve surface wind speed along the satellites' ground tracks. The orbits are designed such that there is excellent coverage of the tropics and subtropics, resulting in better sampling intervals over tropical cyclones than is possible with current scatterometers. Furthermore, CYGNSS will be able to retrieve winds under all precipitating conditions, and over the full range of wind speeds in a tropical cyclone. Using model output from a tropical cyclone nature run (Nolan et al., 2013) as truth, synthetic wind speed data from CYGNSS and flight level data have been created. The nature run spans 13 days and is based on ECMWF's Joint OSSE global nature run. Our aim is to show H*Wind sensitivity to the CYGNSS data set by performing a data denial experiment. H*Wind, a hurricane surface wind objective analysis tool is largely known in the science community for producing real-time surface wind analyses. It uses all available platforms that provide wind measurements, and adjusts all the data into a common framework. Wind analyses and statistics with and without CYGNSS data will be presented.