Correction of SeaWinds Normalized Radar Cross Sections for improved coastal winds

This paper presents a new methodology to correct the land-contaminated normalized radar cross-section (\sigma_{0}) measurements acquired by the SeaWinds scatterometer, which flew onboard the QuikSCAT satellite platform from 1999 to 2009, operated by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). This method is based on the hypothesis that contaminated \sigma_{0}\mathbf{s} are linearly dependent on the Land Contribution Ratio (LCR) index, which is defined as the ratio of the footprint area contaminated by the presence of land to the total footprint area. Furthermore, the \sigma_{0} deviations from the expected contaminated \sigma_{0} values are 'regularized' using an adimensional constant, which is defined as the ratio of the noise level evaluated at the \sigma_{0} level of the sea to the noise level of the expected contaminated \sigma_{0} level. The preliminary results show that this methodology is effective up to few kilometers to the coast. In addition, it prevents the excessive presence of negative corrected \sigma_{0}\mathbf{s}.