2013 New Release of Daily Satellite Turbulent Fluxes

The surface turbulent fluxes estimated from satellite observations are reprocessed for QuikSCAT period October 1999 – November 2009 (Bentamy et al, 2013). They are calculated as daily turbulent air-sea fluxes over global oceans with a spatial resolution of 0.25° in longitude and latitude.

The main improvements with respect to V2 version flux products (Bentamy et al, 2008) are related to the improvements of the specific air humidity estimation from radiometer measurements, to the assessment of the surface winds retrieved from QuikSCAT scatterometers, and to the use of the new objective method allowing the calculation of flux analyses over the global oceans.

The required bulk variables such as surface wind speed (W10) and specific air humidity (Qa10) at 10m height are both estimated from remotely sensed measurements. A new empirical model relating brightness temperatures (Tb) from special sensor microwave imager (SSM/I) and Qa10 is developed. The new satellite Qa10 are used in combination with the newly reprocessed QuikSCAT V3, the latest version of sea surface temperature (SST) analyses, and with 10m air temperature estimated from the European Centre for Medium Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) re-analyses (ERA Interim).

Data, in netCDF format, and documentation are available at ftp://ftp.ifremer.fr/ifremer/cersat/products/gridded/flux-merged/v3/.