The Climatology of Global Ocean Winds (COGOW), presented here, is a web-based interactive atlas from which users can retrieve climatological wind maps as well as wind statistics, both in tabular and graphic form, on a 0.5° latitude by 0.5° latitude grid, for almost any particular region of interest. These wind statistics are based on five years (August 1999 – July 2004) of QuikSCAT measurements. The accuracy of QuikSCAT wind measurements is equivalent to that of observations by wellcalibrated buoys. The global coverage of these QuikSCAT data provides valuable information about the wind statistics in the many regions of the world ocean that are sparsely sampled by ships and buoys. COGOW provides the first high spatial resolution, observationally based, online atlas of global ocean winds.