QuikSCAT measured winds in measurement swaths 1,800 km wide centered on the satellite ground track with no nadir gap, such as occurs with fan-beam scatterometers such as NSCAT. Because of its wide swath and lack of in-swath gaps, QuikSCAT was able to collect at least one vector wind measurement over 93% of the World's Oceans each day. This improved significantly over the 77% coverage provided by NSCAT. Each day, QuikSCAT recorded over 400,000 measurements of wind speed and direction. This is hundreds of times more surface wind measurements than are collected routinely from ships and buoys.
