Australian Ocean surface waves dataset from SAR

Abstract

In this article, a regional ocean surface waves dataset from Sentinel-1 A and B Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) satellites has been described. The ocean wave data have been extracted from the Sentinel-1 level-2 OCN (ocean) product as provided by the European Space Agency and downloadable for this region from the Copernicus Australasia regional data hub. The source OCN data have been produced by evolving versions of Sentinel-1 Instrument Processing Facility (IPF). The structure of the source OCN NetCDF files changes over time and presents a challenge in performing long duration, time series analyses, including the examination of potential inconsistencies in OCN wave data, due to employment of different IPF versions over the duration of the satellite missions. Here, the input OCN wave data have been homogenized to a single, easily usable standard format after applying a quality assurance and control procedure that removes various inconsistencies in variables, coordinates, dimensions and land flag, and through the addition of new auxiliary variables. The new format has the desirable properties of being compact in size, consistent in structure, and scalable in temporal and spatial coverage. It is also convenient to use and offers opportunities to perform fast, multi-year regional processing and analysis for calibration and validation studies and scientific applications. No re-processing of Sentinel-1 level-1 data has been carried out in this work.