Cyclone Monitoring with Sentinel-1: Service Demonstration

Abstract

CYMS is an ESA-funded project aiming at scaling up an operational service for Tropical Cyclone monitoring, in view of its potential integration as part of a Copernicus Service. In 2020, the demonstration of such a service has been operated and user s requirements refined. More than 90 scenes of TC have been acquired worldwide with Sentinel-1 A, Sentinel-1 B and Radarsat-2 thanks to the late programming acquisitions. These images have been processed into ocean surface wind field and disseminated to the user community. The user feedback on the data confirms that the capabilities of SAR to probe the ocean surface at high resolution is unique and offer potential for science applications related to the analysis of the TC inner core structure, possibly bringing new insight on the processes within the eye. Those observations are also crucial over regions lacking any aircraft observation or ground-based meteorological Radars for monitoring and validating the cyclone forecasts. One of the main requirements is the need for Near Real-Time distributions of CYMS observations to allow their operational use. This is currently stated as a project but one of the objectives is to ensure that one of the Copernicus services hosts a service dedicated to Cyclone Observation to allow acquisitions on Cyclones in a Copernicus framework.