Liu, HuiGarrett, KevinIde, KayoHoffman, Ross N.The operational Aeolus Level-2B (L2B) horizontal line-of-sight (HLOS) retrieved Rayleigh winds, produced by the European Space Agency (ESA), utilize European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) short-term forecasts of temperature, pressure, and horizontal winds in the Rayleigh–Brillouin and M1 correction procedures. These model fields or backgrounds can contain ECMWF model-specific errors, which may propagate to the retrieved Rayleigh winds. This study examines the sensitivity of the retrieved Rayleigh winds to the changes in the model backgrounds, and the potential benefit of using the same system, in this case the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Finite-Volume Cubed Sphere Global Forecast System (FV3GFS), for both the corrections and the data assimilation and forecast procedures. It is shown that the differences in the model backgrounds (FV3GFS minus ECMWF) can propagate through the Level-2B horizontal line-of-sight Rayleigh wind retrieval process, mainly the M1 correction, resulting in differences in the retrieved Rayleigh winds with mean and standard deviation of magnitude as large as 0.2 m·s−1. The differences reach up to 0.4, 0.6, and 0.7 m·s−1 for the 95th, 99th, and 99.5th percentiles of the sample distribution with maxima of ∼1.4 m·s−1. The numbers of the large differences for the combined lower and upper 5th, 1st, and 0.5th percentile pairs are ∼6,100, 1,220, and 610 between 2.5 and 25 km height globally per day respectively. The ESA-disseminated Rayleigh wind product (based on the ECMWF corrections) already shows a significant positive impact on the FV3GFS global forecasts. In the observing system experiments performed, compared with the ESA Rayleigh winds, the use of the FV3GFS-corrected Rayleigh winds lead to ∼0.5% more Rayleigh winds assimilated in the lower troposphere and show enhanced positive impact on FV3GFS forecasts at the day 1–10 range but limited to the Southern Hemisphere.en-USArticle