Abstract
The Winds and Currents Mission (WaCM) is a proposed approach to meet the need identified by the NRC Decadal Survey for the simultaneous measurements of ocean vector winds and currents. WaCM features a Ka-band pencil-beam Doppler scatterometer able to map ocean winds and currents globally. We review the principles behind the WaCM measurement and the requirements driving the mission. We then present an overview of the WaCM observatory and tie its capabilities to other OceanObs reviews and measurement approaches.
Highlights
Air-sea interaction is a critical component of the Earth’s weather and climate systems and plays an important role in ocean biology
Our science goals require an instrument that can provide simultaneous measurements of winds and ocean surface currents: we examine the state of retrieving these from space
Since the wind stress curl is essential to understanding wind-current interactions, we seek a system that can improve the spatial resolution of existing scatterometers at low-noise performance
Summary
Air-sea interaction is a critical component of the Earth’s weather and climate systems and plays an important role in ocean biology. The ASCAT constellation is operational, and complemented in by scatterometers launched by India (ScatSat-1) and China (HY2A, HY2B, CFOSAT), the sampling currently available (concentrated at ~9a.m./9p.m. or ~6a.m./6p.m., with systematic daily gaps in the tropics and midlatitudes, ∼25 km spatial resolution) is not sufficient to provide measurements of global winds/stress and wind/stress derivatives at appropriate space-time sampling, which, as we discuss below require both wide-swath coverage and high spatial resolution. To achieve these two requirements, the WaCM mission will collect both winds and currents from the same platform.
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