Improvement to the NOAA NCEI Global Blended Sea Surface Wind Product

Abstract:

The NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI) Blended Sea Winds dataset contains globally gridded, high-resolution ocean surface vector winds on a global 0.25° grid and time resolution of 6-hourly, from which daily and monthly means and other lower resolutions are computed. NCEI is in the process to upgrade this datasets, starting from July 9, 1987 onward, and results are presented in this presentation. For the near real time data production, a suite of satellite observations (from up to eight imager and scatterometer platforms) are blended together to fill in the data gaps (in both time and space) of the individual satellite samplings, while reducing the subsampling aliases and random errors. The remaining gaps are filled using wind forecasts resulting in a totally gap-free product. The wind vectors come from the operational mode NOAA’s near real-time 0.25 degree Global Forecast System (GFS). The GFS quarter degree data is obtained readily from UCAR THREDDS server as well NCEI THREDDS servers (as backup) and are read and sliced online using a OPeNDAP url from these THREDDS servers. This results in production of the following four near real-time products:

1. 6-hourly Blended Sea-surface Wind Vectors (U/V) and Wind Stress (𝜏)
2. Daily Blended Sea-surface Wind Vectors (U/V) and Wind Stress (𝜏)
3. Monthly Blended Sea-surface Wind Vectors (U/V) and Wind Stress (𝜏)
4. Blended Ocean Wind climatology

The user-friendly web interfaces and data formats have extended the product's wide user communities, such as applications in marine transportation safety and efficiency (e.g. near-real-time ship routing services), in offshore renewable energy research and assessment, applications in ecosystem and fisheries, ocean engineering, infrastructure and environmental services, marine and weather forecasting, among others.