ASCAT Documentation

The data products are obtained using European organization for the Exploitation of Meteorological Satellites (EUMETSAT)’s Advanced Scatterometer (ASCAT) based on MetOp-A satellite data from Remote Sensing Systems (REMSS) [Ricciarduli et al. 2014]. The primary objective of this scatterometer is to measure the wind speed and direction over the oceans. ASCAT is a C-band scatterometer operating at a frequency of 5.2 GHz and is using 3 vertically-polarized antennas for transmission. We have also provided a comparative analysis of kinematic and thermodynamic properties around the cold pools from ASCAT and MERRA-2 (Modern Era Retrospective Reanalysis v2). These properties were obtained within (±) 80 km of the centroid of the cold pool. MERRA-2 is a global reanalysis product from NASA with a spatial resolution of 50kmx62.5km and an hourly temporal frequency.

This webpage contains the dataset corresponding to following properties in the vicinity of a cold pool:

  1. Identified regions of cold pools given by the parameters: coords_x and coords_y.
  2. 10m horizontal surface winds from ASCAT (After removing the rain contamination) : u and v
  3. horizontal divergence and vertical vorticity products from ASCAT and MERRA-2: divg_asc, vort_asc, divg_mer, vort_mer.
  4. Surface Sensible and Latent Heat flux from ASCAT and MERRA-2: hflux_asc, eflux_asc, hflux_mer, eflux_mer.
  5. Surface temperature from MERRA-2: t2m, t10m.
  6. Sea Surface Temperature from MERRA-2: sst
  7. Specific Humidity from MERRA-2: qv2m, qv10m
  8. Horizontal density from MERRA-2: rhoa
  9. Precipitation from NOAA CMORPH product: precip