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NOAA/NCEI Blended Global Sea Surface Winds, Version 2

Published by NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information | National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Department of Commerce | Catalog Last Checked: April 12, 2026 at 09:27 PM | Dataset Last Updated: October 15, 2023 at 12:00 AM
The NBSv2.0 dataset synthesizes observations from multiple satellites (up to 16 satellites since 1987) to create globally gridded, high-resolution 10 m neutral ocean wind speeds and wind stress components. The wind directions come from two sources depending on the products: for the research delayed mode product, the source is the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts ERA5 and for the near-real-time products, the source is the National Centers for Environmental Prediction (NCEP) GFS. This is an updated version of the existing NOAA NBS v1.0, which is a global gridded 0.25 degree and 6-hourly/daily/monthly sea surface winds product that has wide applications in marine transportation, marine ecosystem and fisheries, offshore winds, weather and ocean forecasts, and other areas. A Climatological mean or WMO 30-year Normals are also generated for this product. This newly developed version 2 shows improvement (over its predecessor version 1.0) in following aspects: Resolving very high winds associated with Cyclones/Hurricanes, A gap-free global spatial coverage, Better improved algorithm and coded with open source Python reducing the computational clock time by 10x, and A near-real time production. The data are available in netCDF format for the period of record, July 1987 to present, with six-hourly, daily, and monthly time resolutions for both the blended Sea Surface Wind (SSW) as well as SSW stress data.

Resources

8 resources available

  • NCEI Dataset Landing Page

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  • Direct Download (Dataset Files)

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  • Direct Download (Documentation Files)

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  • NCEI THREDDS

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  • Hurricane and Typhoon Storm Wind Resolving NOAA NCEI Blended Sea Surface Wind (NBS) Product

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  • Blending Multi-Satellite Data to Improve Hurricane Forecasting

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  • NOAA NCEI Blended Seawinds (NBS v2)

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  • Global Change Master Directory (GCMD) Keywords

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