Mission
Multichannel sea surface temperature (SST) products have been constructed operationally from the five-channel Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer (AVHRR) by NOAA's National Environmental Satellite, Data, and Information Service (NESDIS) since late 1981. The most recent Pathfinder AVHHR data set is the AVHRR Pathfinder SST version 5 (listed first below). Version 5.0 of the data set is a collaborative effort between NOAA's National Oceanographic Data Center (NODC), the University of Miami's Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences (RSMAS), and NASA's Physical Oceanography Distributed Active Archive Center (PO.DAAC). The primary differences between version 5.0 of the algorithm and version 4.1 are an improved land mask, the addition of an ice mask, and the higher spatial 4km resolution. Additionally the parameters in version 5.0 are contained in separate files that are in the HDF-SDS (scientific data set) format, unlike version 4.1 that was in HDF-RASTER. The other data sets listed include climatologies, buoy comparisons and circulation/current products.
Product 216 data includes daily, 5 day, 8 day, monthly and yearly averages. As of August 2008 it includes data from January 4, 1985 through 2007. Pathfinder AVHRR data comes from NOAA -9 (1/4/1985 – 11/07/88 & 9/14/94 – 01/21/95), NOAA – 11 (11/8/88 – 9/13/94), NOAA-14 (1/22/95 – 10/11/2000), NOAA-16 (10/12/00 – 12/31/02), NOAA-17 (01/01/03 – 06/04/05), and NOAA-18 (06/05/05 – 12/31/06) satellites.
All the orbits are sun synchronous and have an ascending node of between 13:30 and 14:20 local time with the exception of NOAA-17 that has a daytime descending node of approximately 10:00. |
![](https://webarchive.library.unt.edu/eot2008/20080916012000im_/http://podaac.jpl.nasa.gov/images/spacer.gif) |
AVHRR Pathfinder 2006 Annual Mean SST |
Related Publications
Brown J. W., Brown O. B. and Evans R. H., 1993. Calibration of AVHRR Infrared channels: a new approach to non-linear correction, Journal of Geophysical Research, 98 (NC10), 18257-18268. Kidwell, K., 1991. NOAA Polar Orbiter User's Guide. NCDC/NESDIS, National Climatic Data Center, Washington, D.C.. McClain E. P., Pichel W. G. and Walton C. C., 1985. Comparative performance of AVHRR based multichannel sea surface termperatures, Journal of Geophysical Research 90, 11587-11601. McMillin, L. M. and Crosby D. S., 1984. Theory and validation of the multiple window sea surface temperature technique. Journal of Geophysical Research, 89(C3), 3655- 3661. Stowe, L. L., McClain E. P., Carey R., Pellegrino P., Gutman G. G., Davis P., Long C., and Hart S., 1991. Global distribution of cloud cover derived from NOAA/AVHRR operational satellite data, Adv. Space Research, 3, 51-54.
Casey, K.S. and P. Cornillon, A comparison of satellite and in situ based sea surface temperature climatologies, J. Climate, vol. 12, no. 6, pp. 1848-1863, 1999.
Armstrong, E.M., and J. Vazquez, A new global satellite-based sea surface temperature climatology, Geophys. Res. Letters, 28, no. 22, pp. 4199-4202, 2001 |