Spacebased Observation of Global Ocean Surface Wind Fields

The ocean and the atmosphere are dynamically coupled by the transport of momentum which is driven by the wind shear at the sea surface. However, in situ wind measurements are relatively sparse over most of the world’s ocean and are largely limited to the locations of shipping routes. They are insufficient to cover the temporal and spatial scales required to study global environmental changes. There are only two ways of providing synoptic and global surface wind fields, from spacebased observations and from numerical weather prediction (NWP) models.