SAR Winds

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The Great Lakes SAR wind data files produced at National Environmental Satellite Data and Information Service (NESDIS) Center for Satellite Applications and Research (STAR) SAR term and hosted at the CoastWatch Great Lakes node.  

The extracted SAR surface wind speeds are adjusted to represent winds at 10 meter height.  The algorithm to convert the Normalized Radar Cross Section (NRCS) is run on all SAR image pixels, however valid wind speeds are only obtained from water pixels.  Wind retrievals from ice and land pixels are invalid.  The NetCdf files contain a land mask  (land/water) and an ice mask (ice/water) to identify between valid and invalid wind retrievals.