Now that 20 years of SSM/I and 9 years of QuikSCAT data are available, users of radiometer and scatterometer data have begun to provide the scientific community with descriptions of global wind patterns. For instance, mean wind and high wind climatologies and a power density analysis have been recently released for 8 years of QuikSCAT data. Similarly, more can now be learned about regional winds that are not resolved by weather model winds. The longer time series of satellite winds now make it possible to understand the characteristics of regional wind patterns that may have infrequent or sporadic occurrence and give us a chance to understand how these features may change over time, possibly highlighting how global climate change manifests itself on local meteorology.

DISCOVER, a NASA REASoN funded project, provides both radiometer and scatterometer data to the scientific community. These consistently processed, intercalibrated ocean data sets have been used to look at global mean wind patterns and trends, occurrence and location of high and low winds, and regional wind features such as wind jets like that found entering the Gulf of Tehuantepec.

For this presentation, we have selected a regional wind located in the Intra-Americas Sea that is observed in the SSM/I and QuikSCAT wind products. We characterize the wind by describing location, intensity, duration and frequency of occurrence. In addition, we will look at the variation of the wind feature over time and relate it to sea surface temperature and surface pressure changes. We will also examine how these findings compare with recent WindSat and ASCAT observations of the same wind feature.