Standard Presentation 2024 Australian Marine Sciences Association Annual Meeting combined with NZMSS

Australasian Coastal SAR Ocean Winds: Data, Portal, and Next Products (#151)

Marites Canto 1 , Salman Khan 2
  1. Environment, CSIRO, Townsville, Queensland, Australia
  2. Environment, CSIRO, Aspendale, Victoria, Australia

High-resolution coastal wind data across the Australian region is vital for understanding coastal dynamics and supporting various applications including environmental applications, climate research, recreational activities, and industry sector such as the emerging offshore wind energy. This presentation aims to highlight the newly developed database of regional high-resolution (1 km) ocean surface winds over the Australian region. This database exploits the Sentinel-1 Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) Level-2 acquisitions over the Australian nearshore areas complementing global scatterometer wind measurements. The database has been made available through the Australian Ocean Data Network (AODN) portal which provides an interface that facilitates data access with the ability to search and filter by date, spatial extent, percentage of map containing wind data, satellite platform, and swath as well as quick display of wind maps of interest. A regularly gridded version of this dataset has been recently developed and updated approximately every six months. Such coastal winds archive is envisaged to be of great importance to both the Australian marine science research community and industry sector as data can help to better understand coastal wind climatology alongside other regional/global model hindcast and reanalyses products, and verification of model wind fields.