Abstract:
This data set contains monthly mean and monthly climatological mean
wind stresses (dynes/cm**2), wind stress curl (dynes/cm**3), and
Sverdrup transport stream functions and Sverdrup transport
anomalies (gm/s) for the years 1980 through 1986. The data are given on a
2.5 X 2.5 lat/lon grid based upon twice-daily 1000 mb wind analyses from
the European Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasts
... (ECMWF) obtained
from the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) archive. The data
set consists of (level III) global gridded data consisting of the
following variables: wind stress in the x direction (STRESS_X), wind
stress in the y direction (STRESS_Y), total wind stress (STRESS_T),
wind stress curl (CURL), Sverdrup transport and Sverdrup transport
anomalies (SVERD_T), and mean sea ice/land coverage. The data set
consists of data covering the global oceans excluding those areas
climatologically covered with ice. The twice-daily 1000 mb ECMWF
wind analyses were chosen for the wind stress analysis instead of the
conventional ship data for its better coverage and temporal
sampling. The ECMWF analysis was used over the National Meteorology Center
(NMC) analysis for its ability to adequately analyze the Southern
Hemisphere and for its completeness (i.e. no missing field problems and
corrupt fields that occasionally plague the NMC analyses).
This dataset may be obatined via World Wide Web from the Goddard
Space Flight Center Distributive Active archive, from NCAR or from
LDEO/IRI
NCAR - http://dss.ucar.edu/datasets/ds110.1/
GSFC/DAAC - http://disc.gsfc.nasa.gov/
LDEO/IRI - http://ingrid.ldeo.columbia.edu/SOURCES/.TRENBERTH/ 
