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atio d fo ese Thi ind igh companies, marine resource managers, and the international shipping community. An understanding of the global wind field Release 1 (Slutz et al., 1985; Woodruff et al., 1987) have a total number of wind observations that is less than 900. In other It is clear from Figs. 1 and 2 that wind forcing over vast portions of the global oceans is significantly under-sampled, develop an online Climatology of Global Ocean Winds (COGOW). Two previously published atlases of observationally based global ocean climatological winds are the Marine Climatic Atlas Remote Sensing of Environment 1is therefore clearly desirable. Observationally based understand-ing has long been limited by poor in situ coverage by buoys and ships (Fig. 1a). Even in areas where such observations exist, their distribution is highly variable in both time and space (Fig. 1b and c) and, as such, the in situ data do not adequately resolve global ocean winds. The Fig. 2 reveals that, for the 38-year period January 1960–December 1997, about 70 % of grid cells within the Comprehensive Ocean–Atmosphere Data Set (COADS) both temporally and spatially, from ship-based observations. Since July 1999 this situation has changed. Through high-resolution spatial sampling and frequent temporal sampling by the National Aeronautics and Space Agency's (NASA) Quick Scatterometer (QuikSCAT) satellite launched in June 1999, wind speed and direction are sampled daily at a 25 km resolution over approximately 90 % of the global oceans. The objective of this study is to use the first 5 years of the QuikSCAT data set to © 2006 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved