The Physical Oceanography Distributed Active Archive Center (PO.DAAC) is pleased to announce the availability of Level-3 products from the Combined Active-Passive (CAP) Algorithm applied to the Aquarius/SAC-D version 2.0 data. These L3 datasets include 7-day and monthly CAP sea surface salinity (SSS) and wind speed mapped products. Note that the former product is based on a 7-day rolling mean, such that a L3 CAP 7-day data file for both SSS and wind speed is available for each day of the Aquarius mission series. The CAP algorithm simultaneously retrieves salinity, wind speed and wind direction by minimizing the sum of squared differences between model and observations. After testing the CAP algorithm against the Aquarius data, the least squares algorithm (LSE) performs very well for the Aquarius version 2.0 data.
Data are processed through the end of March 2013, and will be
augmented on monthly intervals for the next few months. The lag is due to the
delays required to have the new data necessary to recalculate the
Aquarius sensor calibrations. All users are strongly encouraged to work
with V2.0 over any previous Aquarius/CAP evaluation versions.
The v2.0 CAP L3 data sets are described and discoverable via the PO.DAAC data portal. Access to these data is
via PO.DAAC’s public FTP site (ftp://podaac-ftp.jpl.nasa.gov/allData/aquarius/L3/mapped/CAPv2/)
and also via OPeNDAP, and THREDDS.
L3 CAP data set visualization and subsetting is available via LAS.
The CAP
Users Guide, README.CAP
and other primary technical documentation relating to Aquarius data, are available
from the FTP site together with reader software. General information
regarding Aquarius/SAC-D mission is available from the mission website and also
via PO.DAAC’s Aquarius and salinity webpages.
Questions may be addressed to: podaac@podaac.jpl.nasa.gov