This daily High-Resolution (HR) Level 3 gridded wind product is derived from Copernicus Sentinel-1 SAR (Synthetic Aperture Radar) observations, over the Mediterranean Sea ("MED" area).

It is based on the European Space Agency (ESA) Level-2 OCN products at the highest available resolution. Although L2-OCN products already contain wind vectors, those are calculated using the CMOD5.n Geophysical Model Function (GMF) applied to the co-polarized (co-pol) VV channel (emitting in Vertical polarization and receiving in Vertical polarization). This VV GMF was mapped from scatterometer sensors (Hersbach et al., 2007) which are only able to use co-pol measurements. However, these co-pol GMF are known to lose sensitivity for wind above 20 m/s. Therefore, wind based on such GMF alone, are known to under-estimate wind speed (Polverari et al., 2022). For the L3 products winds based on SAR, we take advantage of the available cross-polarized (cross-pol) VH channel (emitting in Vertical polarization and receiving in Horizontal polarization) for which GMF were specifically derived based on C-Band SAR (Mouche et al., 2017, Mouche et al., 2019). Winds estimated from the combination of both the co-pol and cross-pol channels are referred to as dual-polarization (or dual-pol) winds. As shown in Mouche et al. (2019), taking advantage of the dual polarization strongly improves the wind estimation for high wind conditions thanks to the much greater VH channel sensitivity compared to VV.

These new wind estimations are then gridded with a 0.012 degree resolution (between 0.5 and 1.2 km in zonal direction depending on the latitude and 1.3 km in meridional direction) using a cylindrical equidistant projection, independently for ascending and descending satellite passes and for each satellite (so 4 wind fields are available per day for two satellites). This dataset is generated over all Sentinel-1 mission time series starting from March 2018 and updated in delayed mode with a 4-months delay. It is also produced for 4 other different European areas.

This dataset is produced and disseminated in the frame of Copernicus Marine Service.