N: 90 S: -90 E: 180 W: -180
Description
Day and night spatially gridded (L3) global NASA skin sea surface temperature (SST) products from the Moderate-resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) onboard the Aqua satellite. Average daily, weekly (8 day), monthly and annual skin SST products at are available at both 4.63 and 9.26 km spatial resolution. Aqua was launched by NASA on May 4, 2002, into a sun synchronous, polar orbit with a daylight ascending node at 13:30, formation flying in the A-train with other Earth Observation Satellites (EOS), to study the global dynamics of the Earth atmosphere, land and oceans. MODIS captures data in 36 spectral bands at a variety of spatial resolutions. Two SST products can be present in these files. The first is a skin SST produced for both day and night (NSST) observations, derived from the long wave IR 11 and 12 micron wavelength channels, using a modified nonlinear SST algorithm intended to provide continuity of SST derived from heritage and current NASA sensors. At night, a second SST product is generated using the mid-infrared 3.95 and 4.05 micron wavelength channels which are unique to MODIS; the SST derived from these measurements is identified as SST4. The SST4 product has lower uncertainty, but due to sun glint can only be used at night. To generate the L3 products the L2 pixels are binned into an integerized sinusoidal area grid (ISEAG) and mapped into an equidistant cylindrical (also known as Platte Carre projection. Additional projection detailed can be found at https://oceancolor.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/format/ The NASA MODIS L3 SST data products are generated by the NASA Ocean Biology Processing Group (OBPG) and Peter Minnett and his team at the Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science (RSMAS) are responsible for sea surface temperature algorithm development, error statistics and quality flagging. JPL acquires MODIS ocean L3 SST data from the OBPG and is the official Physical Oceanography Data Archive (PO.DAAC) for SST. The R2019.0 supersedes the previous v2014.1 datasets which can be found at https://doi.org/10.5067/MODSA-1D4D4
Product Summary
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Variables
Variables are a set of physical properties whose values determine the characteristics or behavior of something. For example, temperature and pressure are variables of the atmosphere. Parameters and variables can be used interchangeably. Variable level attributes provide individual information for each variable.
The Name in this table is the variable name. Fill value indicates missing or undefined data points in a variable. Valid range is the range of values the variable can store. Scale factor is used to increase or decrease the size of an object and can be used to correct for distortion. For questions on a specific variable, please use the Earthdata Forum.
| Name Sort descending | Description | Units | Data Type | Fill Value | Valid Range | Scale Factor |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| lat | Latitude | degrees_north | float | -999 | -90 to 90 | 1 |
| lon | Longitude | degrees_east | float | -999 | -180 to 180 | 1 |
| palette | palette | N/A | ubyte | N/A | N/A | 1 |
| qual_sst | Quality Levels, Sea Surface Temperature | N/A | ubyte | 255 | 0 to 5 | 1 |
| sst | Sea Surface Temperature | degree_C | short | -32767 | -1000 to 10000 | 0.005 |