The PO.DAAC is pleased to announce the availability of the version 4.0 Aquarius/SAC-D data. This is the official NASA/Aquarius Project end-of-prime-mission dataset spanning the complete 3 year, 9 nine month period of Aquarius science data availability, from August 25, 2011 through June 7, 2015 when an unrecoverable hardware failure caused the end of the mission. This end-of-prime mission dataset does not preclude future reprocessings. An updated version (V5.0) is planned for release in 2016, and subsequent updates will be released when measurable improvements are achieved.

Data sets comprising this release include the Level 2 orbital data and Level 3 mapped salinity, wind speed, and derived density products at 1 degree spatial resolution for ascending, descending and combined passes and for the following time intervals: daily, 7 day, monthly, seasonal, annual. New products (added since V3.0), in addition to density, include 7-day and 28-day running mean products, seasonal and monthly climatology datasets, and cumulative (mission mean) products. The V4.0 data are also comprised of a complementary set of similarly gridded L3 ancillary SST products. A summary of improvements with this new version of the Aquarius data is available here. All users are advised to work with v4.0 over any previous versions.

The Aquarius v4.0 data sets are described and discoverable via the PO.DAAC data portal. Access to these data is via PO.DAAC's public FTP site: ftp://podaac-ftp.jpl.nasa.gov/allData/aquarius/. The data are also accessible via a range of PO.DAAC tools and services: OPeNDAP, THREDDS, Aquarius Level 3 Browser, LAS, the HiTIDE L2 subsetter and associated Web Services.

The Aquarius Data Users Guide, Aquarius Data Validation Document, and other primary technical documentation, are available from the FTP site together with reader software. General information regarding Aquarius/SAC-D mission is available from the mission website and also via PO.DAAC's Aquarius and salinity webpages.

Should you have any questions, please contact us at: podaac@podaac.jpl.nasa.gov.