Content

Data

This product provides wind-related surface parameters, as observed by various scatterometers - ERS-1 & ERS-2/AMI-Wind, ADEOS/NSCAT and QuikSCAT/SeaWinds -, averaged and mapped on global 1°x1° resolution (0.5° x 0.5 for QuikSCAT) geographic grids using an objective analysis method. These parameters include :

• the wind speed and its zonal (eastward) and meridional (northward) components, as well as their related standard errors (from the objective analysis)
• the wind stress magnitude and its zonal (eastward) and meridional (northward) components, as well as their related standard errors (from the objective analysis)
• the wind divergence
• the stress curl

All these parameters are computed for each scatterometer, on their complete availability period, in two different time resolution (or averaging period) : weekly and monthly. It makes available a long-term homogeneous and consistent temporal series of wind-related parameters (10 year long for the ERS-1/ERS-2   mission). Refer to the inventory section for more details on the available fields according to the scatterometer.

A monthly climatology, generated from both ERS-1 and ERS-2 monthly mean fields, is also provided within this product.

What else can you find within this product?

• a browser section enables to visualize with any internet navigator quicklook pictures of all the fields provided. Navigation across the picture files is made easier thanks to useful  Javascript functionalities.
• the documents section gives the user access to the user manuals, which provide explanation on the scatterometers, the format of the files, the processing details and the validation of the fields. The format of the files is also provided online.
• the netCDF primer is a excellent tutorial for users learning to access netCDF files.

Data file organization

sat_mwf1	folder tree The dataset is split on two separate disks (or folder on the WOCE DVD) : sat_mwf1 for ERS-1 and ERS-2 wind fields, sat_mwf2 for NSCAT and QuikSCAT wind fields. Each one contains a data folder organized with several levels as follow : a folder by satellite (or climatology) : ers1, ers2 (disk sat_mwf1) or nscat, quikscat (disk sat_mwf2) a folder by averaging period : weekly, monthly a folder by year All wind fields are provided as zip-compressed files in netCDF format. There is a file per averaged time period, each one containing all computed wind parameters. file naming convention <start_date>-<end_date>.nc where :   start_date is the start date of the averaged period (format 'YYYYMMDDhhmm')   end_date is the end date of the averaged period (format 'YYYYMMDDhhmm') ex: 200204150000-200204220000.nc stands for the weekly mean from April 15, 2002 to April 22, 2002
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data
ers1
weekly
1991
1992
1993
1994
1995
1996
monthly
ers2
weekly
monthly
climatology-ers
monthly
documents
html
sat_mwf2
browse
data
nscat
weekly
1996
1997
monthly
quikscat
weekly
monthly
documents
html