Air-Sea Surface Processes

This web page includes links to the various datasets and descriptions of various projects regarding to air-sea interaction processes. We strive to make excellence to service to the community. Your feedback will contribute to this excellence and will be appreciated.

Rationale: The Earth’s weather and climate system contains two major constantly changing components – the atmosphere and the ocean. These two components vigorously interact with each other over about 70% of the Earth’s surface and these interactions directly regulate the Earth’s water and energy cycles. In short term, the weather systems drive the ocean processes such as storm surges. In long term, the ocean redistributes the heat and other properties (e.g. CO2) and thus regulates the climate regimes [e.g., El Nino/La Nina, Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO), etc].

WCRP Perspectives: Both the modeling and observation communities agree that accurate sea and land surface processes are key to the improvement of numerical weather prediction (NWP) and climate forecast skills. In response, various World Climate Research Programme (WCRP) Working Groups initiated and promoted the Surface Flux Analysis (SURFA) and the Global Energy and Water Cycle Experiment (GEWEX) SEAFLUX projects. The SURFA objective is to establish a facility for the evaluation of surface fluxes and related parameters from NWP and climate models. This facility is equally useful for the evaluation of satellite-based fluxes and related parameters - the focus of the SEAFLUX. NOAA NCDC participates in both projects and serves as the central archive for the SURFA datasets. Additional to the NCEP archive at NCDC by NOMADS, the archive currently includes the in situ data from the OceanSITES and the NWP model output from ECMWF and German DWD.

Blended Surface Marine Products: Satellite-based turbulent air-sea fluxes and related parameters are also being developed at NCDC. These include the global 0.25-degree grid seawinds and sea surface temperatures blended from multiple satellites and in situ observations, and the retrievals of sea surface air temperature and humidity using a neural-network from the AMSU measurements onboard the NOAA polar orbiting satellites.

ICOADS: NCDC ingests, archives, quality controls and serves the International Comprehensive Ocean-Atmosphere Data Set (ICOADS). As the result of a US project starting in 1981, available global surface marine data from the late 18th century to date have been assembled, quality controlled, and made widely available to the international research community in products of the Comprehensive Ocean-Atmosphere Data Set (COADS). A new name, International COADS (ICOADS), was agreed upon in 2002 to recognize the multinational input to the blended observational database and other benefits gained from extensive international collaboration. ICOADS data are available at NCDC and NOAA ERSL.

VOSClim: NCDC is also the data archive and service center for the international VOSClim project. VOSClim is an ongoing project within JCOMM's Voluntary Observing Ships' Scheme. It aims to provide a high-quality subset of marine meteorological data, with extensive associated metadata, to be available in both real-time and delayed mode to support global climate studies.