Abstract:To improve the frequency and accuracy for measuring ocean hurricane intensity, a joint use of cyclone global navigation satellite system (CYGNSS) and soil moisture active and passive (SMAP) satellites data to measure the hurricane intensity was investigated. First, the satellite data characteristics were introduced. Then, taking Hurricane Florence as an example, a method was proposed by fusing the satellite data to measure the ocean hurricane intensity, including the preprocessing of satellite data, the extraction of high wind speed area using a pixel-level data fusion method, and the measurement of hurricane intensity. Finally, the observation results of ten hurricanes were compared with the highest wind speed measured by the American National Hurricane Center (NHC). The root-mean-square difference, mean absolute error, and correlation coefficient were adopted to analyze the differences among the wind speed measurement results. Results demonstrate that compared with the case of the SMAP satellite data, the proposed method could measure the hurricane intensity at more frequent intervals, and more complete high wind speed area was obtained. The comparison between the hurricane intensity obtained using the proposed method and measured by NHC shows that the mean absolute error ranged between 3.9 and 10.2 m/s, the root-mean-square difference varied between 4.6 and 12.5 m/s, and the correlation coefficient ranged between 0.570 7 and 0.915 2, which confirms the effectiveness of the proposed method in measuring hurricane intensity.