OSCAR: Global Ocean Surface Currents on a 0.25-Degree Grid from 1993

NASA OSCAR Project provides a global database of daily averaged ocean surface currents from 1993 to the present day. The data is calculated from satellite-sensed sea surface height, wind, and temperature gradients using a physical model for geostrophy, Ekman, and thermal wind dynamics. It is generated by Earth & Space Research (ESR) and hosted on AWS.

Use Cases

• Modeling global ocean circulation patterns based on satellite-derived current velocities.
• Analyzing the transport of heat and materials in the ocean mixed layer based on daily averaged surface currents.
• Validating physical ocean models against observational data based on the geostrophy, Ekman, and thermal wind dynamics used in the OSCAR model.
• Studying long-term changes in surface currents for climate research based on the data's coverage from 1993 to present.

Strengths

• Provides three quality levels with defined latencies: final (~1 year), interim (~1 month), and nrt (~2 days).
• Offers long-term temporal coverage, with data available from 1993 to the present day.
• Has a consistent global spatial resolution on a 0.25 x 0.25 degree grid.
• Derived from multiple satellite data sources (sea surface height, winds, temperature) using a documented physical model.

Limitations

• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Row count and total dataset size are unknown, which may limit suitability assessment.
• Data may reflect the biases and limitations inherent to the satellite sources and the simplified physical model used.

Provenance

Source

Earth & Space Research (ESR), funded by NASA.

Collection Method

Calculated from satellite-sensed sea surface height gradients, ocean vector winds, and sea surface temperature gradients using a simplified physical model.

Time Range

1993 to present day.

Freshness

Data is updated with three latency tiers, including a near-real-time product with ~2-day latency.

Geography

Global.