The PO.DAAC is pleased to announce the public release of the MetOp-B ASCAT
Level 2 datasets provided by the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute
(KNMI) and the European Organization for the Exploitation of Meteorological
Satellites (EUMETSAT) Ocean and Sea Ice Scatterometer Application Facility
(OSI SAF). Two Level 2 netCDF datasets are included in this release:
- operational 25 km (with an effective resolution of 50 km) and
- operational 12.5 km (with an effective resolution of 25 km) optimized for coastal ocean regions.
Tandem ASCAT‑A and ASCAT‑B scatterometer data is foreseen until the
launch of MetOp‑C with ASCAT‑C. MetOp-B is in co-planar orbit and nearly
half an orbit (~50 minutes) out of phase with respect to MetOp-A. In
particular near the equator the tandem coverage depicts wind field changes
over 50 minutes, whereas at latitudes above 50 degrees, complete morning and
evening coverage is now obtained.
It should be noted that there are no plans by KNMI to produce a secondary
12.5-km dataset, as was previously done for MetOp-A, as it has been
determined to have no added value. With a successful launch on 17 September
2012, the MetOp-B spacecraft is a follow-on to MetOp-A with identical
instrument payloads and operational requirements.
Both datasets are currently available via FTP and OPeNDAP from 29 October
2012 to present, distributed in near-real-time with an approximate 2 hour
latency from the latest observation (under nominal operations).
More details and access to the 25-km dataset can be found here:
http://podaac.jpl.nasa.gov/dataset/ASCATB-L2-25km.
More details and access to the 12.5-km coastal dataset can be found here: http://podaac.jpl.nasa.gov/dataset/ASCATA-L2-Coastal.
More details on the MetOp mission can be found here: http://podaac.jpl.nasa.gov/MetOp.
Should you have any questions or wish to provide feedback on this dataset,
please contact us at: podaac@podaac.jpl.nasa.gov
References:
[1] Verhoef, A., M. Portabella and A. Stoffelen, 2012: High-resolution ASCAT
scatterometer winds near the coast, IEEE Trans. Geosci. Remote Sens., 50, 7,
2481-2487, doi:10.1109/TGRS.2011.2175001
[2] Verspeek, J. A., A. Stoffelen, M. Portabella, H. Bonekamp, C. Anderson,
and J. Figa, 2009: Validation and calibration of ASCAT using CMOD5.n, IEEE
Trans. Geosci. Remote Sens., 48, 1, 386-395,
doi:10.1109/TGRS.2009.2027896.