Global Six-Hourly Ocean Wind Speeds and Directions from Multi-Sensor Satellite Data

6-hourly global gridded data provides wind speed and direction at a 1/64th degree horizontal resolution. The dataset is a harmonized product from NASA's MWOW Project, combining retrievals from KaRIn satellite-based SAR with interpolated data from five scatterometers and one radiometer. An initial bulk ingest of data occurred in January 2026, with forward streaming planned for later in the year.

Use Cases

• Modeling air-sea heat flux by correlating high-resolution wind_speed and wind_direction with sea surface temperature data.
• Validating scatterometer wind retrievals against KaRIn SAR observations where data overlaps spatially and temporally.
• Analyzing diurnal wind patterns using the 6-hourly timestep dimension across the global ocean grid.
• Assessing regional wind variability by comparing separate observations from the Hai Yang 2B and 2C satellite scatterometers.

Strengths

• High spatial resolution of 1/64th degree for detailed ocean surface analysis.
• Harmonized product combines data from seven distinct satellite instruments (KaRIn SAR, five scatterometers, one radiometer).
• Observations are kept separate per instrument along the time dimension, preserving source provenance.

Limitations

• Version 0 is an initial assessment release with no user guide, intended for stakeholder feedback.
• Data are not aggregated into a composite wind map per timestep, requiring user-side integration for some analyses.
• Temporal coverage begins with a bulk ingest in January 2026, limiting historical analysis.

Provenance

Source

NASA's MWOW Project, funded by the Satellite Needs Working Group (SNWG), produced by POCLOUD.

Collection Method

Satellite remote sensing combining retrievals from KaRIn synthetic aperture radar with interpolated data from multiple scatterometers and a radiometer.

Time Range

Initial data from January 2026 onward.

Freshness

6-hourly update frequency with forward streaming planned from 2026.

Geography

Global ocean coverage.