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The OAFlux project is an ongoing research and development project for global air-sea fluxes. The project is committed to developing enhanced global estimates of air-sea fluxes of heat, fresh water, and momentum, with a goal of establishing a one-stop source for global ocean surface forcing datasets that serves the needs of the ocean and climate research community. The project focuses on efforts to improve the quantification of physical interactions and feedbacks between the ocean and atmosphere, and gain enhanced understanding of the role that these air-sea processes play in global energy budget, water cycle, atmosphere and ocean circulation, and the Earth’s climate.

The OAFlux project is so called because it applies objective analysis approach to take into account data errors in the development of enhanced global flux fields. The objective analysis denotes the process of synthesizing measurements/estimates from various sources. Such process reduces error in each input data source and produces an estimate that has the minimum error variance. The OAFlux project uses the objective analysis to obtain optimal estimates of flux-related surface meteorology and then computes the global fluxes by using the state-of-the-art bulk flux parameterizations.

The project currently provides global time series of ocean latent and sensible heat fluxes, ocean evaporation, and flux-related surface meteorology from 1958 to present, and maintains a twice-per-year update of the datasets. Global analysis of satellite-based high-resolution ocean surface vector wind fields has also been developed for the period from July 1987 onward. All data sets are freely available from the project ftp site. Please acknowledge the WHOI OAFlux project in your use of OAFlux products. For questions, please contact us.