Fig. 4. Hourly mean absolute and rms differences of wind vector (m/s) for the three experiments (AVN = short dashed line = expt 1, NOQ = long dashed line = expt 2, MM5 = solid line = expt 3). Differences are computed by subtracting all QSCAT wind observations available within the model domain from the MM5 forecasts. Available QSCAT wind observation locations ranged from just over 5000 up to nearly 7700.