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Welcome to the Value Added Products (VAP) webpage for QuikSCAT. This page is
merely a filler, you should probably bookmark
the pages you want to view routinely, so that you can go directly there.
I'll present a short explanation on this page for those who've never been
here. There's more specific information concerning the products on this
webpage located on the information page
and more information on the SeaWinds instruments and the two missions carrying
them can be perused at the Scatterometer
Project homepage . If we encounter any item of particular interest,
we may put it on the special
projects page. The status of the various instruments can be found
on the status
page.
Synopsis
This collection of pages contain output from several processors of
two broad types: 'overlays' and 'animations.'
Overlays
The 'overlays' combine the cloud imagery from several geosynchronous
satellites with SeaWinds scatterometry. They fall into two seperate
types, the simple overlay, which is region specific and 'tropical
storm,' were we try to follow cyclonic storms a little more
closely. Since the geosyncrhonous satellites from which we get our
cloud imagery are region specific, all of the overlays, regardless of
type, have some region dependency. These regions are, roughly: North
Atlantic (GOES8) , North-Eastern Pacific (GOES10) and, in the western
Pacific (GMS5). We'll occasionally experience outages from these
satellites, sometimes extended outages. The general rule is: if either
the wind or the cloud data exists, an overlay will be made.
Animations
The animations take data from both scatterometers, create a synoptic interpolated
field and then create an animation from that field. In this animation,
the windspeed is conveyed by the color of the backgroup, blue is low
windspeed and magenta high, and the direction of the wind by the
motion of the arrows in the animation. Despite the fact that this
animation shows things moving, this is not a 'time series.' The wind
field here is static, in the sense that at each location in the
picture the direction and speed of the wind doesn't change.
Data
The QuikSCAT data is available on the PO-DAAC ftp site.
The filenames tell you the source of the data
and its time range.
The files have names like:
AAYYYYMMDD.SHHMM.EHHMM where
AA='QS'
YYYY is the year
MM is the month
DD the day of the month
S signifies 'start time', i.e. of the first data in the file
HH the hour of the start time.
MM the minute of the start time
E signifies the 'end time' i.e. of the last data in the file.
and HH/MM are the same as in the start time.
So, a file named QS20030321.S1001.E1102
is QuikSCAT data, the first data has the time tage of 10:01 on the
21 of March, 2003 and the last 11:02 on the same day.
There is one oddity, if the data in the file goes over the day
boundary the end time will be less than the start time.
Readers (in C and IDL) can be found in the readers
subdirectory.
Site manager: Ted Lungu
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