TOVS Polar Pathfinder (Path-P) Derived Arctic Winds

The TIROS-N Operational Vertical Sounder (TOVS) Polar Pathfinder (Path-P) derived wind dataset consists of gridded daily wind fields north of 60 degrees latitude. The dataset is gridded at 100km spatial resolution on an Equal-Area Scalable Earth Grid (EASE-Grid). Daily Northern Hemisphere data are available from July 1979 through December 2005. The dataset is derived from TOVS Path-P temperature profiles, combined with the National Centers for Environmental Prediction (NCEP) Reanalysis-1 10m winds and surface pressure.

The dataset was derived based on the method described in Zou and Van Woert (2002) for the Antarctic and extended to the Arctic region in Francis et al. (2005). The wind vector is calculated for 7 levels at each grid point using the standard thermal wind equation, TOVS temperature profiles and the NCEP 10m winds. The data is further corrected using a Lagrange Multiplier approach subject to a mass conservation constraint appropriate for the pole.

The dataset was derived at the Institute for Marine and Coastal Sciences at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, NJ. It includes NCEP 10m winds (corrected) and surface pressure linearly interpolated to the EASE grid, as well as derived wind data at 7 levels.