source: trunk/adm/website/overview.rst @ 186

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.. DESCRIPTION
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.. overview
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.. TODO
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.. outline overview vs home/index
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.. EVOLUTIONS
.. ==========
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.. $Id$
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.. $URL$
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.. _overview:

Overview
========

The TropFlux project aims at providing daily, timely, accurate air-sea heat
and momentum flux data for the entire 30°N-30°S region.

Wind stresses and the four components of net surface heat flux are currently
available for the entire 1979 to September 2011 period.
We are currently working on a regular (~monthly) update of the
TropFlux product until 3-4 months behind realtime, which should be
available in 2012.

TropFlux is largely derived from a combination of
|erai|_
re-analysis data for turbulent and longwave fluxes, and
|isccp|_
surface radiation data for shortwave flux.
All input products are bias- and amplitude-corrected on the basis of
|gtma|_
data, before surface net heat flux and wind stresses are computed using the
|coare|_.
A precise description of the flux computation procedure, as well as a
detailed evaluation against other timely, daily air-sea heat flux
alternatives (OAFLUX, NCEP, NCEP2, ERA-I) is provided in
|pkbetal2012|_.
The wind stress product is described, evaluated and compared against other
widely used products (QuikSCAT, NCEP, NCEP2, ERA-I) in
|pkbetal2012b|_

We believe that this product offers the following advantages:

 - better variability and less biases than re-analysis fluxes (and equivalent
   or slightly better than the best performing products:
   |oaflux|_ for heat fluxes and
   |erai|_ 
   for wind stresses) ,
 - available until Septempber 2011, and soon updated every month, lagging
   realtime by ~3 months,
 - a simple estimate of surface shortwave radiation is provided from OLR
   data, as a near-realtime alternative to the more accurate but irregularly
   updated ISCCP data.

The TropFlux product has been developed under a collaboration between the
`Laboratoire d'Océanographie: Expérimentation et Approches Numériques (LOCEAN) <http://www.locean-ipsl.upmc.fr/>`_ from
`Institut Pierre Simon Laplace <http://www.ipsl.fr/>`_, France and
`National Institute of Oceanography/CSIR <http://www.nio.org/>`_, India.
Bilateral scientific visits to France and India have been supported by 
`Institut de Recherche pour le Développement <http://www.ird.fr/>`_, France.