Abstract
Oceanwide direct measurement of the surface wind stress is impracticable; instead, the wind stress must be parameterized in terms of individual shipboard wind reports. The number of ship observations, however, are insufficient over the tropical oceans for an adequate analysis of the wind stress. A method is developed to take advantage of the monthly mean wind field which can be determined by meshing several sources of data with the ship observations. It is shown that a single empirical correction factor can be used to estimate the surface pseudostress from monthly mean winds for all months throughout the oceanic tropics.
