ICOADS MarineFlux Air-sea Fluxes

This dataset contains air-sea fluxes derived by the NOAA MarineFlux project using bulk formulas from a subset of the International Comprehensive Ocean-Atmosphere Data Set (ICOADS) R3.1.0 (1990-2014); and R3.0.2 (2015-2020). Fluxes are derived from ship-based and mooring-based observations and are available for the period 1990-2020. These fluxes are derived from individual marine weather and ocean reports and are provided at the time and location of the original observations. The product contains fluxes from three bulk algorithms: Smith 1988, Bourassa 2023, and COARE3.6. We also produced a second product that includes bias corrected air temperature values from the National Oceanography Center (NOC) in the UK, reference to An observational record of global gridded near surface air temperature change over land and ocean from 1781.

The ICOADS fluxes are provided in netCDF files that use COARDS, CF-1.11, ACDD-1.3, and NCCSV-1.1 conventions and include CF standard names (v89), when available. Temporal coverage is 1990-2020 and the observations span the global oceans from -80 to 90 degrees_north and -179.99 to 180.0 degrees_east. Flux observations are provided at the same time and location as the individual ship and mooring marine observations. Data files each contain one month of flux observations. The fluxes files are named using the following structure: [AAA]ICOADS[MM]_[YYYY].nc, where [AAA] represents the Smith 1988 (S88) or Bourassa 2023 (B23) flux algorithm, [MM] = 2-digit month, and [YYYY] = 4-digit year. Versions that include the NOC bias-adjusted marine air temperatures have "_NOC" appended following the year in the file name. Each product is ~80GB in size, totaling 480GB for the six products (S88, B23, C36 with and without the NOC bias adjustment).