Earthdata Forum

Hello,

I need wind speed and wind direction for a project on a terrestrial bird species. I was looking through Earthdata database, but can't find anything that matches what I need.
I don't need high time resolution, like daily dominant wind direction and max or mean wind speed will be enough. For spatial resolution, since I'm using the Temperature and precipitation information from "Beaudoing, H. and M. Rodell, NASA/GSFC/HSL (2020), GLDAS Noah Land Surface Model L4 3 hourly 0.25 x 0.25 degree V2.1, Greenbelt, Maryland, USA, Goddard Earth Sciences Data and Information Services Center (GES DISC), Accessed: 31/12/2022, 10.5067/E7TYRXPJKWOQ" retrieved regularly by the GIS team of my NGO, the same spatial resolution would be fine. Anything higher would be fine too, I can summarize.

I wrote to Earthdata support who answered that you may be able to help in this forum.

I'm sorry if there was an obvious answer, I'm a wildlife population biologist, so lots of the things I was reading, I don't fully understand!

Best wishes,
Chloé

Hello Chloé,
NOAA's NCEP North American Regional Reanalysis (NARR) is a dataset that often fills the need for gridded wind estimates. Feel free to post here with further questions or if the NARR data does not fit your needs.
Best wishes,
Michele

Hello Michele,

Thank you for your quick answer. It looks like it would have been great, but I forgot a key info in my original message: our project is in the UAE (Sweihan, Abu Dhabi). Is there anything similar with a world-wide cover?

Thank you again,
Chloé

Chloe,

I would recommend using our Giovanni system, https://giovanni.gsfc.nasa.gov/. It provides windspeed and wind direction data from both the Global Land Data Assimilation System (GLDAS) and the Modern-Era Retrospective analysis for Research and Applications Version 2 (MERRA-2). Giovanni is not difficult to use for those who are new to NASA Earth science data. If you wish further guidance, reply here or contact our Help Desk (link on our homepage, https://disc.gsfc.nasa.gov, and they will likely refer your questions to me.

Further information:

GLDAS only has windspeed, not direction. This URL selects the GLDAS windspeed variables (different temporal resolutions). https://giovanni.gsfc.nasa.gov/giovanni/#service=TmAvMp&starttime=&endtime=&variableFacets=dataFieldMeasurement%3AWind%3BdataProductPlatformInstrument%3AGLDAS%20Model%3B

This URL selects the MERRA-2 wind variables.
https://giovanni.gsfc.nasa.gov/giovanni/#service=TmAvMp&starttime=&endtime=&variableFacets=dataFieldMeasurement%3AWind%2CWind%20Velocity%3BdataProductPlatformInstrument%3AMERRA-2%20Model%3B

Note that you can select a shapefile for the UAE, or create a rectangular bounding box for your region of interest.