Release of new global wind fields from Metop scatterometer

New gridded daily wind fields from Metop/ASCAT scatterometer retrievals are produced in near real-time over global ocean with a spatial resolution of 0.25°. They are in netCDF format and span from April 2007 to present.

These daily wind and wind stress fields have been estimated over global oceans from Metop/ASCAT retrievals using objective method. The analyses use standard products ASCAT L2b during the period April 2007 through March 2009, and ASCAT L2b 12.5 from April 2009 to present. The resulting fields have spatial resolutions of 0.25° in longitude and latitude. The calculation of daily estimates uses ascending as well as descending available and valid retrievals.

The objective method aims to provide daily-averaged gridded wind speed, zonal component, meridional component, wind stress and the corresponding components at global scale. The error associated to each parameter, related to the sampling impact and wind space and time variability, is provided too. More details about data, objective method, computation algorithm may be found in (Bentamy et al, 2011).

This first version is considered as data test that will provide useful insight for near real time production of high space and time resolutions at global and regional scales. Data, documentation, images, and movies are available on Cersat/ Ifremer ftp site (ftp://ftp.ifremer.fr/ifremer/cersat/products/gridded/MWF/L3/ASCAT/Daily/) and freely distributed. The data files are in NetCDF-3 format, supported by several scientific softwares.