A comparative assessment of monthly mean wind speed products over the global ocean

The accurate estimation of marine wind speed is important for climate and air-sea interaction applications. There are many datasets of monthly mean wind speeds available based either on in situ measurements, satellite retrievals, atmospheric reanalysis assimilating both in situ and satellite data and blended datasets combining some or all of these other data sources. Twelve different monthly mean wind speed datasets are compared for the period from 1987 to 2009. The results suggest that we cannot presently be confident that the mean wind speed over the ocean is known to the accuracy required for the calculation of air-sea heat fluxes. Comparisons are complicated by different representations of wind speed being presented in different datasets. The in situ and reanalysis datasets present stability-dependent, earth-relative, wind speeds adjusted to a reference level of 10m. The satellite and blended datasets present neutral equivalent, surface-relative, speeds adjusted to a reference level of 10m. Differences between these estimates depend on atmospheric stability and ocean currents and can be greater than the required accuracy target. The adjustment for stability is itself uncertain but it is shown that these uncertainties are likely to be smaller than biases caused when the effects of stability are neglected. Further differences among the datasets are identified. Biases are caused by unidentified rain in K-u-band scatterometer-derived wind speeds and by atmospheric effects on passive microwave wind retrievals. When satellite observations affected by rain are removed a fair-weather bias remains. Some datasets are biased low in coastal regions by the effects of lower wind speeds over land in atmospheric models affecting wind speeds near the coast. All these uncertainties combine to give a wide range of estimates of monthly mean wind speed for the chosen datasets with uncertainty in mean values, spatial patterns and changes over time.