The Scatterometer Climate Record Pathfinder

While originally designed for ocean wind measurement, radar scatterometers have proven to be very effective in monitoring land cover and ice conditions and in climate studies. The NASA Scatterometer Climate Record Pathfinder (SCP) project has generated a unique climate data record from the series of historic and ongoing scatterometer missions. Image data are archived from the Sea-Winds on QuikSCAT instrument, the scatterometer mode of the ERS-1/-2 AMI, the NASA Scatterometer (NSCAT), and the Seasat Scatterometer (SASS). In this paper we describe several SCP data sets and illustrate their application to studies of climate change over Greenland.