Ocean latent (LHF) and sensible (SHF) heat flux products developed by several scientific groups have been examined in the European Space Agency (ESA) Ocean Heat Flux (OHF) project. This dataset is the collocations of nine OHF products with in situ surface marine observations of the International Comprehensive Ocean–Atmosphere Data Set (ICOADS Version 3). Required for inclusion are that a) valid collocations exist with all OHF products and their ensemble and b) all ICOADS variables required to calculate a COARE flux estimate are within 2.8 estimated standard deviations of their respective smoothed monthly climatology. All values (including ICOADS flux estimates by the COARE 3.0 algorithm) are considered at the daily, 0.25-degree resolution of the project’s reference grid. The nine product collocations include additional samples at daily intervals from two days before to two days after ICOADS collocation. Further information about the nine standardized products can be found in Bentamy et al. (2018).

GlobCurrent is an analysis that linearly combines the geostrophic and Ekman components. Drifters respond locally to a combination of geostrophic, Ekman, tidal, inertial, Stokes, and wind drift processes, including processes on scales smaller and faster than the GlobCurrent grid can resolve. Collocations of drifters (whose drogues move roughly with the 15-m current) and GlobCurrent (also at 15 m, with additional samples at daily intervals from two days before to two days after collocation) are included in this dataset. Six-hourly drifter velocity has been estimated following Hansen and Poulain (1996). We restrict attention to drifters whose continuous drogue presence was confirmed by objective or subjective means (Rio et al. 2012, Lumpkin et al. 2013). The resulting geographic distribution for 1993-2015 (Fig. 1) yields more than eleven million drifter and GlobCurrent zonal and meridional velocity estimates. (A comparable number of drifters lost their drogues and, being more responsive to surface wind forcing, are omitted.)