Characterization of residual information for SeaWinds quality control

Recent work has shown the important properties of the wind inversion residual or Maximum Likelihood Estimator (MLE) for Quality Control (QC) of QuikSCAT Hierarchichal Data Format (HDF) observations. Since March 2000, the QuikSCAT Near-Real Time (NRT) Binary Universal Format Representation (BUFR) product is available. As this product is used for Numerical Weather Prediction (NWP) assimilation purposes, a QC procedure for the BUFR product is needed. We study the behavior of the MLE in order to determine whether the HDF QC procedure is appropriate for BUFR data. A comparison using real HDF and BUFR data reveals that the MLE distributions of HDF and BUFR differ and are actually poorly correlated. One important difference between BUFR and HDF is the amount of signal averaging prior to wind inversion. 1 IEEE Trans. Geosci. Rem. Sens., Vol. 40, No.12, pp. 2747-2759, 2002.  Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.