Strengths and weakness of remotely sensed winds are discussed, along with the current capabilities for remotely sensing winds and stress. Future missions are briefly mentioned. The observational needs for a wide range of wind and stress applications are provided. These needs strongly support a short list of desired capabilities of future missions and constellations.

The China-France Oceanography Satellite (CFOSAT) to be launched in October 2018 will carry two innovative payloads, i.e., the surface wave investigation and monitoring instrument and the rotating fan-beam scatterometer [CFOSAT scatterometer (CFOSCAT)]. Both instruments, operated in Ku-band microwave frequency, are dedicated to the measurement of sea surface wave spectra and wind vectors, respectively. This paper provides an overview of the system definition and characteristics of the CFOSCAT instrument. A prelaunch analysis is carried out to estimate the scatterometer backscatter and wind quality based on the developed CFOSCAT simulator prototype. The overall simulation includes two parts: first, a forward model is developed to simulate the ocean backscatter signals, accounting for both instrument and geophysical noise. Second, a wind inversion processor is used to retrieve wind vectors from the outputs of the forward model. The benefits and challenges of the novel observing geometries are addressed in terms of the CFOSCAT wind retrieval. The simulations show that the backscatter accuracy and the retrieved wind quality of CFOSCAT are quite promising and meet the CFOSAT mission requirements.

Ocean current is highly related to the interaction between ocean and atmosphere. By measuring the speed and direction of the ocean current from space, we can investigate the ocean- atmosphere interaction on a global scale. The ocean-atmosphere interaction helps to maintain the balance that is essential for planet habitability. However, the conventional scatterometer is unable to measure the ocean current vector. To achieve this, a potentially feasible approach is to use a bigger antenna, a higher PRF, and measure the interferometric phase of two successive echoes. This paper derives four decorrelation factors, and provides the phase error model first. Then, an end-to-end simulation model is established, and it is used to analyze the feasibility of ocean surface current measurement from space. Based on the simulation model, the system parameters are optimized. The simulation results show that the current speed standard deviation (Std), which means the measurement accuracy, in along-track and cross-track direction is smaller than 0.1 m/s when the wind speed is larger than 4 m/s. The swath can be used for current vector inversion that is greater than 70% when the wind speed is larger than 7 m/s. Meanwhile, Kpc of the modified scatterometer is computed and the results show that Kpc is better than the traditional pencil-beam rotating scatterometer when the wind speed is larger than 6 m/s.

A Ku-band rotating, fanbeam scatterometer (RFSCAT) will be used to measure the sea surface wind field from a polar-orbiting small satellite with a rotating, range-gated fanbeam radar scatterometer. The measurement principle and instrument are introduced in this article. An end-to-end simulation model is adopted to analyse and optimize the performances of the system, taking into account the radar observation conditions. Then two kinds of spatially coherent wind fields, namely a parallel wind field and a circular wind field, as well as an incoherently random wind are simulated to assess the system performances. The results show that with the chosen configurations, the performance for wind vector retrieval of the discussed scatterometer is roughly comparable to the pencil-beam radar scatterometers (e.g. SeaWinds on QuikSCAT), and exceeds it at some wind regimes over part of its swath. Particularly, it usually has a better performance for wind direction retrieval, though with a narrower swath.