Wind atlas of the Northern European Seas based on Envisat ASAR, QuikSCAT and ASCAT

In the EU project NORSEWInD (Northern Seas Wind Index database, www.norsewind.eu) which lasted from 2008 to 2012 there was a goal of contributing a satellite-based wind atlas for the Northern European Seas. The effort included collection of more than 9000 Envisat ASAR WSM wide swath mode scenes covering the Baltic Sea, Irish Sea and North Sea during the years 2002 to 2012. The near-real-time processing to wind maps was done at CLS and DTU Wind Energy using various CMOD’s and with a priori input of wind directions from the ECMWF and NOGAPS models. At CLS the in-house processing was used. At DTU Wind Energy the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory processing was used.