Source/sensor: NOAA-n AVHRR

Coverage: 1985 - 1997, 1985 - 1999, global

Abstract: This product contains pentad (five day) climatologies of sea surface temperature (SST) data using the V4, V4.1, and interim V4.1 NOAA/NASA AVHRR Oceans Pathfinder data. The climatologies were created by spatially and temporally gaussian interpolating the highest quality SST data to pentad periods on a 9.28 km grid. Two baseline periods are available: 1985-1997 and 1985-1999. The climatological SST files are flat binary files containing arrays of 4096 by 2048 8-bit unsigned characters with a 76 byte header. Following the file header, the sucessive pentad arrays are stacked one on top of each other (i.e., pentad 1 is followed by pentad 2 etc.). For more infomation see the README file.

This climatology has been "performance tested" using the method described in Casey and Cornillon (1999). Preliminary results based on this test indicate that the JPL climatology performs in a statistically robust manner when using independent longterm in situ SST observations as a comparison set.

Data Set Volume: ~160 MB compressed

Smallest order: One file via FTP

Data Format: Binary

Media Format:
These data are available via anonymous FTP to podaac.jpl.nasa.gov in the pub/sea_surface_temperature/climatology/pathfinder/jpl/ directory.