The PO.DAAC is pleased to announce the public release of the NOAA CYGNSS Level 2 Science Wind Speed 25-km Product Version 1.2. More information regarding the CYGNSS mission and instrumentation is available from PO.DAAC’s CYGNSS mission page.

This dataset provides the time-tagged and geolocated average wind speed (m/s) in 25x25 kilometer grid cells along the measurement tracks from the Delay Doppler Mapping Instrument (DDMI) aboard the CYGNSS satellite constellation. This version corresponds to the second science-quality version released by PO.DAAC, produced by NOAA/NESDIS using a specific geophysical model function (GMF version 1.0) and a track-wise debiasing algorithm (Said et al., 2019) as part of the wind speed retrieval process. The reported retrieval locations are determined by averaging the specular point locations falling within each 25 km grid cell.

Version 1.2 (DOI: 10.5067/CYGNN-22512) includes four major updates compared to Version 1.1 (DOI: 10.5067/CYGNN-22511), namely: 1) the inclusion of data associated to a spacecraft roll angle exceeding +/- 5 degrees; 2) an improved wind speed performance in the higher wind speed regime; 3) a full revision of the quality flags; and 4) the inclusion of a wind speed retrieval error variable. 

These CYGNSS retrieved winds cover the global tropical oceans within a latitude domain of approximately 40° S to 40° N starting from 1 May 2017 and extending through the near-present day with a latency of approximately 6 days (or better) from the last recorded measurement time. Data are formatted as netCDF-4 (CF/ACDD compliant) with 1 file produced for each day (each file containing data from up to 8 unique CYGNSS spacecraft). The data, associated documentation, tools and services are described and discoverable via the PO.DAAC data portal.

Citation: NOAA/NESDIS/STAR/SOCD, PO.DAAC, 2022-06-02, NOAA CYGNSS Level 2 Science Wind Speed 25-km Product Version 1.2, DOI: https://doi.org/10.5067/CYGNN-22512.

Reference: Said, F., Jelenak, Z., Park, and Chang, P. S.. 2021. The NOAA Track-Wise Wind Retrieval Algorithm and Product Assessment for CyGNSS, IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing. vol 60. pp 1-24. https://doi.org/10.1109/TGRS.2021.3087426

Comments/Questions? Please contact podaac@podaac.jpl.nasa.gov or visit the PO.DAAC Ocean Wind Forum.