The PO.DAAC is pleased to announce the "Preview" release of "QuikSCAT Level 3 Near-Coast Wind and Stress Fields with Enhanced Coverage for the US West Coast" produced by Dr. Barry Vanhoff, Mr. Craig Risien, and Dr. Ted Strub at the Oregon State University (OSU). This is part of a larger effort by Vanhoff et al. in developing "Enhanced Coastal Coverage" datasets to substantially improve coastal scatterometer coverage of wind and stress in coastal regions that are of significant importance to the oceanographic community. The coastal wind vector retrieval algorithm, developed by Drs. Barry Vanhoff and Michael Freilich, has been utilized to provide improved coastal wind vector retrievals from QuikSCAT, resulting in retrievals as close as 5 km from coastlines. Additional "Enhanced Coastal Coverage" datasets are planned for this year, which will provide coverage for the Gulf of Alaska and the Canadian West Coast.

The Vanhoff et al. dataset contains 12 wind and stress parameters, on a consistent 0.1°x0.1° lat/lon grid, subsetted for the US West Coast region (30°-50° N, 225°-245° E), including: ocean surface wind and stress vector retrievals (magnitude and zonal/meridional components) and derived quantities (wind speed squared, wind speed cubed, surface relative vorticity, vector wind divergence, wind stress curl, and wind stress divergence). The data record begins on 20 July 1999 and ends on 21 November 2009. The dataset files are provided in CF-compliant NetCDF format.

Distribution of this dataset will begin in "Preview" mode, as provided for all PO.DAAC datasets during their preliminary evaluation phase. In this evaluation phase, all data users are encouraged to provide feedback. Read software is only available in IDL, but efforts are underway to make read software available in C, Fortran, and MATLAB.

This dataset was made possible through funding provided by the NASA Research Opportunities in Space and Earth Science (ROSES) program and the NOAA-funded Cooperative Institute for Oceanographic Satellite Studies (CIOSS) program.

If you wish to access and read more about this dataset, please visit our new web portal, which is in beta state: http://podaac-www.jpl.nasa.gov/dataset/QSCAT_OSUCOAS_L3_OW_USWestCoast

Should you have any questions or wish to provide feedback on this dataset, please contact us at: podaac@podaac.jpl.nasa.gov



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