In the past, weather data could be acquired over land, but our knowledge of surface winds over oceans came from infrequent, and sometimes inaccurate, reports from ships and buoys.

Scatterometery has its origin in early radar used in World War II. Early radar measurements over oceans were corrupted by sea clutter (noise) and it was not known at that time that the clutter was the radar response to the winds over the oceans. Radar response was first related to wind in the late 1960's. The first scatterometer flew as part of the Skylab missions in 1973 and 1974, demonstrating that spaceborne scatterometers were indeed feasible. The Seasat-A Satellite Scatterometer (SASS) (http://nasascience.nasa.gov/missions/seasat-1/?searchterm=seasat) operated from June to October 1978 and proved that accurate wind velocity measurements could be made from space. A single-swath scatterometer flew on the European Space Agency's Remote Sensing Satellite-1 (ERS-1) mission.

The NASA Scatterometer (NSCAT) (http://winds.jpl.nasa.gov/missions/nscat/index.cfm) which launched aboard Japan's ADEOS-Midori Satellite in August, 1996, was the first dual-swath, Ku-band scatterometer to fly since Seasat. From September 1996 when the instrument was first turned on, until premature termination of the mission due to satellite power loss in June 1997, NSCAT performed flawlessly and returned a continuous stream of global sea surface wind vector measurements. Unprecedented for coverage, resolution, and accuracy in the determination of ocean wind speed and direction, NSCAT data has already been applied to a wide variety of scientific and operational problems. These applications include such diverse areas as weather forecasting and the estimation of tropical rain forest reduction. Because of the success of the short-lived NSCAT mission, future Ku-band scatterometer instruments are now greatly anticipated by the ocean winds user community. The NSCAT mission proved so successful, that plans for a follow-on mission were accelerated to minimize the gap in the scatterometer wind database. The QuikSCAT mission (http://winds.jpl.nasa.gov/missions/quikscat/index.cfm) launched SeaWinds in June 1999.