TOPography EXperiment (TOPEX) for ocean circulation (otherwise known as Poseidon) was launched on August 10, 1992 and was a joint satellite mission between NASA, the U.S. space agency, and CNES, the French space agency, to map ocean surface topography. The first major oceanographic research vessel to sail into space, TOPEX/Poseidon helped revolutionise oceanography by proving the value of satellite ocean observations.

This dataset contains monthly means on a 1x1 latitude/longitude grid for 12 years (1993-2004). The data contains the following parameters: wind speed, squared wind speed, cubed wind speed, wind speed * significant wave height, significant wave height, 1/sigma0(Ku) and gas transfer velocity. TOPEX/Poseidon was a joint mission from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), the U.S. space agency and the French space agency.

The dataset was produced by Fangohr, S. and D.K. Woolf of SOCS, as part of the NERC programme's Centre for observation of Air-Sea Interactions and FluXes (CASIX) and National Centre for Earth Observation (NCEO).