RapidScat has not been in wind observation mode since 24 December 2015 03:00 UTC with a slight gap of good wind data being retrieved between 28 December 17:37 UTC and 29 December 04:25 UTC, corresponding to orbital revs 7174 through 7180.
The cause of the ongoing outage is due to the ISS orbit, and its yearly beta angle trend (angle to sun), which puts RapidScat temperatures being near their high limits. This period of high temperatures is expected to persist though the remainder of December. The operations team currently plans to return RapidScat into its wind observation mode on 4 January 2016.
Datasets impacted include L2B, L2A 25-km, and L2A 12.5-km.
Due to the 7 day latency of these datasets accessible by PO.DAAC, users should not notice any changes in data availability until approximately 1 January 2016.
Concerned data users who are not currently registered with the PO.DAAC email list are encouraged to register to receive timely data announcement updates via email by contacting podaac@podaac.jpl.nasa.gov.
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