Intraseasonal Kelvin waves forcing and its relationship with ENSO

For some time, surface winds derived from both satellite retrievals and through model re-analysis have had applications in tropical meteorology ranging from global ocean modeling to hurricane forecasting. In order to further support these applications, it is important to identify both the strengths and weaknesses of these types of datasets by comparing them directly with each other over similar time periods. This paper illustrates a comparison between both satellite remote sensors and numerical model global re-analysis data. We compare satellite derived surface winds from both the ERS and SSM/I platforms as well as model re-analyses from the NCEP and ECMWF global forecast models. The comparison is focused over the Pacific Ocean during 1991-1997 for u, v, and divergence. In addition to identifying any differences for the large scale features (i.e., ITCZ), we inspect how the datasets compare in their description of the intraseasonal variation in the Pacific Ocean.