Measuring how fast air moves across land, water, and through the atmosphere is a key component to understanding weather and its many forces and processes that shape our world, factor into the events of our days, and at times, threaten our communities and lives. 

NASA has decades worth of ground, aerial, and satellite-measured data for the entire globe, such as the Modern-Era Retrospective analysis for Research and Applications version 2 (MERRA-2) land surface forcings dataset. Scientists can use wind speed data in many types of research including air quality, tropical cyclones, and wildfires.