CYGNSS L3 Ocean Microplastic Concentration V1.0

This dataset contains the version 1.0 CYGNSS level 3 ocean microplastic concentration data record, which provides 18 netCDF files, each containing one month of daily gridded maps of microplastic number density (#/km^2). Microplastic concentration number density is indirectly estimated by an empirical relationship between ocean surface roughness and wind speed (Evans and Ruf, 2021). User caution is advised in regions containing independent, non-correlative factors affecting ocean surface roughness, such as anomalous atmospheric conditions within the Intertropical Convergence Zone, biogenic surfactants (such as algal blooms), oil spills, etc. This product reports microplastic concentration on a daily temporal and 0.25-degree latitude/longitude spatial grid with 30-day, 1 degree latitude/longitude feature resolution, as constrained by the binning and spatiotemporal averaging of the Mean Square Slope (MSS) anomaly (i.e., difference between measured and predicted ocean surface roughness for a given wind speed).