A method is presented for improving QuikSCAT surface wind fields. The University of Washington Planetary Boundary Layer model is used to retrieve a surface pressure field from any swath of QuikSCAT surface wind vectors. An alternate set of surface wind vectors is computed from the newly calculated pressure field. The latter can be smoothed and the process can be iterated. New surface wind vectors can be calculated where ambiguity removal fails and where measurements are missing. The present methodology preserves boundary layer dynamics and is an improvement over a statistical filter. ¿ 2001 American Geophysical Union