| The Cyclone Global Navigation Satellite System (CYGNSS), a constellation satellite system set to launch in late 2016, is designed so that it will measure ocean surface wind speeds with high spatial and temporal resolution across the Tropics. As a dominant planetary circulation in the Tropics, a Madden-Julian Oscillation (MJO) event was analyzed within a CYGNSS simulator in order to evaluate the data that will retrieved by the satellite prior to launch. The MJO is defined by the slow eastward propagation of enhanced convection across the equatorial region and is known to affect tropical cyclones, monsoon rainfall, ENSO, and other atmospheric and oceanic phenomena. The convective signal of the MJO exists across the data void regions of the Indian and Pacific Oceans. To overcome sparse datasets within the Tropics, CYGNSS will capture ocean surface winds across the tropics via bi-static scatterometry, even through regions of precipitation. This study examines the ability of CYGNSS to effectively observe the small scale wind features associated with the MJO and associated convective storm activity. Data from the weak December 2011 MJO event that occurred during the DYNAMO campaign are assimilated in WRF. Those forecasts are ingested into the CYGNSS end-to end-simulator for analysis of wind data as expected from CYGNSS. |
