New ocean wind speed and direction database available on the AODN Portal

The IMOS Surface Waves sub-Facility, which is operated by CSIRO in partnership with University of Melbourne, have just published a new wind data collection in the AODN Portal.

The new collection is a km-resolution ocean wind speed and direction database over coastal seas of Australia, New Zealand, Western Pacific islands, and the Maritime continent. It is obtained from Europe’s Copernicus Sentinel-1 A and B Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) satellites from 2017 up till present.

A SAR is a microwave radar sensor used to measure the reflection or scattering effect produced while imaging the surface of the earth in high resolution from an aircraft or a satellite. It can record measurements even at night, during cloud cover, and in most weather conditions.

Wind measurements by SAR go all the way up to the coast due to its high resolution, filling critical gaps in ocean wind speed and direction observations in coastal areas.

SAR ocean wind measurements are calibrated and validated against overlaps with offshore Scatterometer and Altimeter wind measurements. Both Scatterometer and Altimeter Ocean winds are already carefully calibrated against ocean buoys.

The new collection is a first of its kind in the region and captures the spatial variability of coastal ocean winds over a wide swath (250 km). SAR measurements over strong wind events, including tropical cyclones, reveals new insights into the structure of extreme wind fields.

These data are useful for offshore industry (oil and gas, fisheries, shipping, offshore wind), protection and management of coasts, habitats, and infrastructure, capturing of sub-mesoscale air-sea interactions, and improvement of forcing in numerical models.