Quality evaluation and calibration of the SWIM significant wave height product with buoy data

The significant wave height (SWH) is one of the main parameters that describe wave characteristics and is widely used in wave research fields. Wave parameters measured by radar are influenced by the offshore distance and sea state. Validation and calibration are of great significance for radar data applications. The nadir beam of surface wave investigation and monitoring (SWIM) detects the global-ocean-surface SWH. To determine the product quality of SWIM SWH, this paper carried out time-space matching between SWIM and buoy data. The data qualities were evaluated under different offshore distances and sea states. An improved calibration method was proposed based on sea state segmentation, which considered the distribution of the point collocation numbers in various sea states. The results indicate that (1) the SWIM SWH accuracy at offshore distances greater than 50 km is higher than that at distances less than 50 km, with an root mean squared error (RMSE) of 0.244 4 m, scatter index (SI) of 0.115 6 and relative error (RE) of 9.97% at distances greater than 50 km and those of 0.446 0 m, 0.223 0 and 18.66% at distances less than 50 km. (2) SWIM SWH qualities are better in moderate and rough sea states with RMSEs of 0.284 8 m and 0.316 9 m but are worse in slight and very rough sea states. (3) The effect of the improved calibration method is superior to the traditional method in each sea state and overall data, and the RMSE of SWIM SWH is reduced from the raw 0.313 5 m to 0.285 9 m by the traditional method and 0.198 2 m by the improved method. The influence of spatiotemporal window selection on data quality evaluation was analyzed in this paper. This paper provides references for SWIM SWH product applications.