World Ocean Circulation Experiment Global Data V3.0 Satellite Surface Winds

Brief description

The World Ocean Circulation Experiment (WOCE) was a part of the World Climate Research Programme (WCRP) which used resources from nearly 30 countries to make unprecedented in-situ and satellite observations of the global ocean between 1990 and 1998 and to observe poorly-understood but important physical processes. This dataset provides sea-surface winds measured by four satellite microwave scatterometers (AMI-Wind onboard ERS-1 and ERS-2, NSCAT onboard ADEOS-1 and SeaWinds onboard QuikSCAT). The data was objectively analyzed into weekly and monthly fields, as well as monthly 9-year climatological averages. The following fields are provided: wind speed and components, wind stress and components, wind velocity divergence and wind stress curl, and their respective mapping errors, analyzed on global 0.5 degree resolution (SeaWinds) and 1 degree resolution (AMI-Wind, NSCAT) grids. When two satellites are operational simultaneously, separate gridded fields are provided for each satellite to allow comparisons to be made.