Surface Wind Fields Over The Oceans W ind is the principal engine driving ocean waves and currents and influencing the exchange of heat between the atmosphere and the oceans.
Wind also helps to redistribute the sun's heat from the tropics into the cooler polar regions.
Wind dynamics, therefore, is crucial to Earth's weather and climate. Satellites can observe global wind patterns on vast stretches of the ocean surface that are not in the shipping lanes and thus not easily measured by ships and buoys. The Seasat scatterometer used a radar beam to measure the roughness of the sea surface, which is caused by wind action. Roughness patterns were then used to derive the wind speeds and directions shown here. This image represents the surface wind over the Pacific Ocean, with North and South America at the right.