Both the modeling and observation communities agree that accurate sea and land surface processes are key to the improvement of numerical weather prediction (NWP) and climate forecast skills. In response, various World Climate Research Programme (WCRP) working groups initiated and promoted the Surface Flux Analysis (SURFA) and the Global Energy and Water Cycle Experiment (GEWEX) SEAFLUX projects. The SURFA objective is to establish a facility for the evaluation of surface fluxes and related parameters from NWP and climate models. This facility is equally useful for the evaluation of satellite-based fluxes and related parameters, which is the focus of the SEAFLUX activities.

NOAA NCDC participates in both of the projects and serves as the central archive for the SURFA datasets. In addition to the NCEP archive at NCDC by NOMADS, the archive currently includes the in situ data from the OceanSITES reference stations, and NWP model output from ECMWF and German DWD. Satellite-based turbulent air-sea heat fluxes and related parameters are also being developed at NCDC. These include the global 0.25-degree sea winds and sea surface temperatures blended from multiple satellites and in situ observations, and retrievals of sea surface air temperature and humidity using a neural-network approach from the AMSU measurements onboard the NOAA polar orbiting satellites. Both the SURFA datasets and the NCDC satellite-based datasets are available in user friendly formats at http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/satellite.html.