Sea surface temperature from AVHRR

The SST observations off the coast of California. Warm areas are shown to be red and colder areas are in blue. The blue colored filaments near the coast indicate cold water being pulled out from the bottom. Copyright: UHH/CEN/AJB

Topics

Access

UNRESTRICTED:

Version 5.3: Get data (netCDF) via HTTPS from NCEI

RESTRICTED: This link to the data set is only available for a restricted user group. The data set is only accessible in CEN/MPI net or accessible from external nets with a customer account. Please contact ICDC if you would like to access this data from outside the network.

Data access via file system: currently none

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Description

This is data of a new re-analysis of the AVHRR data archive, developed within the "AVHRR Pathfinder Version 5 SST Project (Pathfinder V5)" at Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science (RSMAS), University of Miami, Fl, NOAA National Oceanographic Data Center (NODC), and NASA Physical Oceanography Distributed Active Archive Center (PO.DAAC). See the data set documentation under references for more information.

Last update of webpage at ICDC: June 17, 2025.

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Parameters

Parameters of the SST data set
Name	Unit / Comment
SST	°C (sea surface temperature)
dt_analysis	°C (Difference to SST of previous day)
Wind speed	m/s (NCEP/DOE AMIP-II Reanalysis)
Sea ice fraction	0 ... 1 (entweder OSI-SAF or L4 GHRSST DailyOI SST product)
ADI	none (Indicator for atmospheric optical depth)
quality level	none (GDS2 conform flags, 0 (missing data) ... 5 (best quality))
pf quality level	none (original Pathfinder quality flags)
Level 2 data flag	none (Bit-Flag about surface type distribution)

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Coverage, spatial and temporal resolution

Period and temporal resolution:

01-11-1981 to 31-12-2023
Daily, separately for day and night overpasses

Coverage and spatial resolution:

Global
Spatial resolution: 4 km x 4 km, cartesian grid
Geographic latitude: -90.0°N to 90.0°N
Geographic longitude: -180°E to 180.0°E
Dimension: 4320 rows x 8640 columns
Altitude: 0.0 m

Format:

NetCDF

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Data quality

Information is given on the corresponding website at NCEI , at the GHRSST Project Office website, in Kilpatrick et al. (2001) and in Casey et al. (see references). Also the netCDF files contain quality information in form of SST differences to the previous day at the same location as well as two different quality flags.

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Contact

Kenneth S. Casey, NODC Satellite Oceanography Group
email: Kenneth.Casey (at) noaa.gov

GHRSST Project Office
email: ghrsst-po (at) nceo.ac.uk

Stefan Kern
University of Hamburg
E-Mail: stefan.kern (at) uni-hamburg.de

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References

Literature:

Kilpatrick, K. A., Podestá, G. P., and Evans, R. (2001), Overview of the NOAA/NASA advanced very high resolution radiometer Pathfinder algorithm for sea surface temperature and associated matchup database, J. Geophys. Res., 106( C5), 9179– 9197, doi:10.1029/1999JC000065. https://doi.org/10.1029/1999JC000065
Casey, K.S., T.B. Brandon, P. Cornillon, and R. Evans: The Past, Present and Future of the AVHRR Pathfinder SST Program, in Oceanography from Space: Revisited, eds. V. Barale, J.F.R. Gower, and L. Alberotanza, Springer, 2010. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-8681-5_16

Websites:

Data set documentation: https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/sites/default/files/2020-04/AlgorithmDescription.pdf
NODC - Information about the data, a User Guide, tools, and data quality, avhrr-pathfinder-sst, NOAA, https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/products/avhrr-pathfinder-sst
GHRSST Project Office, http://www.ghrsst.org/
https://pathfinder.nodc.noaa.gov

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Data citation, License, and Acknowledgments

Please cite the data as follows:

Version 5.3:

Saha, Korak; Zhao, Xuepeng; Zhang, Huai-min; Casey, Kenneth S.; Zhang, Dexin; Baker-Yeboah, Sheekela; Kilpatrick, Katherine A.; Evans, Robert H.; Ryan, Thomas; Relph, John M. (2018). AVHRR Pathfinder version 5.3 level 3 collated (L3C) global 4km sea surface temperature for 1981-Present. [indicate subset used]. NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information. Dataset. https://doi.org/10.7289/v52j68xx . Accessed [date].

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