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S-MODE DopplerScatt Level 2 Ocean Winds and Currents Version 1

Published by NASA/JPL/PODAAC | National Aeronautics and Space Administration | Metadata Last Checked: February 21, 2026 | Last Modified: 2026-02-17
This dataset contains concurrent airborne DopplerScatt radar retrievals of surface vector winds and ocean currents from the Sub-Mesoscale Ocean Dynamics Experiment (S-MODE) during a pilot campaign conducted approximately 300 km offshore of San Francisco over two weeks in October 2021. S-MODE aims to understand how ocean dynamics acting on short spatial scales influence the vertical exchange of physical and biological variables in the ocean. DopplerScatt is a Ka-band (35.75 GHz) scatterometer with a swath width of 24 km that records Doppler measurements of the relative velocity between the platform and the surface. It is mounted on a B200 aircraft which flies daily surveys of the field domain during deployments, and data is used to give larger scale context, and also to compare with in-situ measurements of velocities and divergence. Level 2 data includes estimates of surface winds and currents. The V1 data have been cross-calibrated against SIO-DopVis leading to the 'dopvis_2021' current geophysical model function. It is expected that additional DopVis data will lead to a reprocessing of this data set and it should be regarded as provisional, to be refined after future S-MODE deployments. Data are available in netCDF format.

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