Oct 9, 2024
The PO.DAAC is pleased to announce the first public release of the COWVR-TEMPEST Temperature Sensor Data Records (TSDRs) and Environmental Data Record (EDR), produced by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The COWVR (Compact Ocean Wind Vector Radiometer) and TEMPEST (Temporal Experiment for Storms and Tropical Systems) instruments are passive microwave radiometers installed on the International Space Station as part of the Space Test Program - Houston 8 (STP-H8) technology demonstration mission. The project aims to demonstrate a lower-cost, lighter-weight sensor architecture for providing microwave data, with the primary objective of ocean surface vector wind products and tropical cyclone intensity tracking for the Department of Defense. More information regarding the project can be found at PO.DAAC’s project page.
An animation of daily global wind speed from COWVR during its first year of operation can be found here .
The data sets include Level 1 brightness temperatures (TSDRs) from both instruments, and Level 2 wind vector, column liquid water, and column precipitable water vapor from COWVR (EDR). Data records span January 2022 to the present, with forward streaming planned at least until August of 2025. Both Level 1 and Level 2 data provide data over the satellite tracks/swaths in HDF5 format, with roughly one file per hour (the orbital period of the International Space Station is ~90 minutes). Version 10.0 is the first un-restricted public release, and is named as such to be consistent with the internal version numbering of the project team prior to release. More information can be found in the EDR User Guide and the Data Product Development Documents, linked to on the landing pages.
The data sets are described and discoverable via the PO.DAAC data portal.
DOI:
Due to the format of these data files, services such as OPeNDAP and Level 2 Subsetter are not available. However, data can be accessed/downloaded via the virtual directory, Earthdata Search, the podaac-data-subscriber tool, or using s3 endpoints in an AWS cloud environment. Data files for period covering January 2022 - present are actively being reprocessed by the COWVR-TEMPEST Project Team, and are ingested by PO.DAAC as they become available. Therefore not all files are available as of this release announcement, but will be over the next few weeks.
Related PO.DAAC Animation:
COWVR Level 2 Wind Speed - First Year of Operation (https://podaac.jpl.nasa.gov/animations/COWVR-Level-2-Wind-Speed-First-Year-of-Operation)
Citations:
Brown, Shannon, Paolo Focardi, Amarit Kitiyakara, Frank Maiwald, Lance Milligan, Oliver Montes, Sharmila Padmanabhan et al. "The COWVR Mission: Demonstrating the capability of a new generation of small satellite weather sensors." In 2017 IEEE Aerospace Conference, pp. 1-7. IEEE, 2017.
Brown, Shannon, Paolo Focardi, Amarit Kitiyakara, Frank Maiwald, Oliver Montes, Sharmila Padmanabhan, Richard Redick, D. Russel, and James Wincentsen. "The compact ocean wind vector radiometer: A new class of low-cost conically scanning satellite microwave radiometer system." In Proc. IEEE Geosci. Remote Sens. Soc.(IGRSS), 35th Can. Remote Sens. Soc.(CSRS), pp. 1-3. 2014.
Farrar, Spencer, Steven Swadley, Shannon Brown, Eric Simon, Sayak Biswas, David Kunkee, and Kieran Smith. "An Initial on-Orbit Performance Assessment of the Compact Ocean Wind Vector Radiometer (COWVR)." In IGARSS 2024-2024 IEEE International Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium, pp. 6277-6281. IEEE, 2024.
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