At the very heart of WOCE were the global measurements made by satellites. The primary interest for WOCE lay with satellite altimetry and its associated geophysical variables of sea level variability and wave height. There were 3 altimeters operating during WOCE, the French and USA satellite TOPEX/POSEIDON (since August 1992), and the European Space Agency satellites ERS-1 (since late 1991) and ERS-2 (since April 1995). In addition the US GEOSAT mission operated just prior to the WOCE field programme. Also of interest are wind speed from scatterometers (the NASA scatterometer NSCAT, and ERS-1 and ERS-2), sea surface temperature (the USA AVHRR or Advance Very High Resolution Radiometer) and water vapour content (TOPEX/POSEIDON and the US Special Sensor Microwave Imager or SSMI).

Satellite data are managed by a variety of agencies and data centres, so there are no WOCE satellite DACs. However, the agencies involved have provided for WOCE all the functions of  WOCE satellite DACs and have contributed to Version 3.0 of the WOCE Global data set.

From Physical Oceanography DAAC at JPL/NASA:

• Topex/Poseidon 0.5 deg sea surface height data and browse images over the period 10/1992 to 12/1999 and also 1x1 deg x 10day averaged grids, with no missing data (added by popular request).

• SST data at .5 and 1 degree resolution over 5 days from 1990 through 1999. The data were derived from the 5-channel Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer (AVHRR) instrument on board the NOAA -7, -9, -11 and -14 polar orbiting satellites, using the 'NOAA/NASA Pathfinder SST' algorithms

From CERSAT ( IFREMER/France and ESA):

• Surface winds measured by four satellite microwave scatterometers (AMI aboard ERS-1 and ERS-2, NSCAT aboard ADEOS-1, and QUIKSCAT), objectively analyzed into weekly and monthly fields, as well as monthly climatological averages from 1991 through 2000. This includes several products, surface wind stress, curl and divergence, etc.