
COAPS MISSION STATEMENT CONTACT INFORMATION STAFF PROJECT LIST DATA DATA APPLICATIONS QC THREDDS

Pacific Pseudostress Analysis 1930 - 1989

based on Dr. Jay Shriver's analysis procedure

The pseudo-stress analyses data may be downloaded by year. The entire climatology data set (1930 - 1989) may be downloaded, as well. Note that the files have been compressed with GNU zip (gzip) software. A freely available program for Windows that will handle GNU zip files is WinZip.

NOTE: 3 May 2001: an error has been discoverd in this product for the years 1945 and 1946. The pseudostress magnitudes are too large. Please do not use these years. We recommend replacing these years with the climatological values.

The data are Pacific Ocean pseudo stress from Dr. Jay Shriver's analysis procedure, on a 84x30 grid, one grid/month. This is the same grid as the FSU subjectively analyzed Pacific pseduo stress product.

The base support for COAPS is the ONR Physical Oceanography Program, NOAA Office of Global Programs supports our TOGA data work and Dr. Jay Shriver was supported by a NASA graduate student researchers program fellowship.

The data are in meters²/sec² with east = positive and north = positive.

Any tau x and tau y with a value of 999.0 is over land.

The data are on a 2 by 2 degree grid, with 84 points e-w and 30 points n-s.

tau x( 1, 1) and tau y( 1, 1) are centered at 124e and 29s
tau x( 2, 1) " " are centered at 126e and 29s
.
.
tau x(83, 1) " " are centered at 72w and 29s
tau x(84, 1) " " are centered at 70w and 29s
tau x( 1, 2) " " are centered at 124e and 27s
tau x( 1, 3) " " are centered at 124e and 25s
. .
ta
u x( 1,29) " " are centered at 124e and 27n
tau x( 1,30) " " are centered at 124e and 29n

The following code is an example of reading the data. Note: the data in the files are scaled up by a factor of 10, and that using this format will scale them to the proper numbers.

program readwd
      dimension taux(84,30),tauy(84,30) 
c
c       read 1 month wind stress grid
c
      read (1,10) month,iyear,taux,tauy 
   10 format (2i5,14f5.1,/(16f5.1)) 
       .
       .
       .
       .
       .
      end

The climatology file (30-89jfs.cli) has the same layout as the yearly data files, with the exception that the year variable reflects the period of the climatology: xxyy, where 19xx is the begining year, and 19yy is the ending year. To retrieve these values in fortran:

read (1,10) month,iyear,taux,tauy 
      begin_year=iyear/100+1900
      end_year=mod(iyear,100)+1900

Reference:

Shriver, Jay F., and J. J. O'Brien, 1993: Interdecadal Variability of the Equatorial Pacific Ocean and Atmosphere: 1930-1989. MASIG Technical Report.

Shriver, Jay F., and J. J. O'Brien, 1995: Low-frequency Variability of the Equatorial Pacific Ocean Using a New Pseudostress Dataset: 1930-1989. J. of Climate, 8, 2762-2786.

Shawn R. Smith
Research Meteorologist
Phone: (850) 644-6918
Fax: (850) 644-4841
Email:winds@coaps.fsu.edu