"The OAFlux project aims to provide consistent, multi-decade, global analysis of air-sea heat, freshwater (evaporation), and momentum fluxes for use in studies of global energy budget, water cycle, atmosphere and ocean circulation, and climate. The OAFlux project is so called because it applies objective analysis approach to take into account data errors in the development of enhanced global flux fields. The objective analysis denotes the process of synthesizing measurements/estimates from various sources. Such process reduces error in each input data source and produces an estimate that has the minimum error variance. The OAFlux project uses the objective analysis to obtain optimal estimates of flux-related surface meteorology and then computes the global fluxes by using the state-of-the-art bulk flux parameterizations. "(http://oaflux.whoi.edu/index.html) The OAFlux products are created from an optimal blending of satellite retrievals and three atmospheric analyses.
The OAFlux products are determined from using the best-possible estimates of flux-related surface meteorology and the state-of-the-art bulk flux parameterizations (Yu et a. 2008, make a link to the online technical report). - The best possible estimates for flux-related surface meteorological variables are obtained by applying an advanced objective analysis that seeks optimal synthesis of satellite and NWP data sources (Note that the present satellite observing capacity cannot provide direct measurements of near-surface air and humidity, and hence auxiliary datasets have to be supplied to fill the missing data sets). - The latent and sensible heat flux estimates are computed from the objectively analyzed surface meteorological variables by using the COARE bulk flux algorithm 3.0 (Fairall et al. 2003). [http://oaflux.whoi.edu/description.html]
Click the thumbnails to view larger sizes
National Center for Atmospheric Research Staff (Eds). Last modified 27 Mar 2014. "The Climate Data Guide: OAFlux: Objectively Analyzed air-sea Fluxes for the global oceans.." Retrieved from https://climatedataguide.ucar.edu/climate-data/oaflux-objectively-analyzed-air-sea-fluxes-global-oceans.
Funding: NSF | National Science Foundation
Based at: NCAR | National Center for Atmospheric Research
A Project of: Climate Analysis Section in Climate and Global Dynamics Laboratory
Created by: Climate Data Guide PIs and Staff