Mission Specification
The Group for High Resolution Sea Surface Temperature (GHRSST) was established to foster an international focus and coordination for the development of a new generation of global, multi-sensor, high-resolution near real time SST products. It brings together international space agencies, research institutes, universities, and government agencies to collectively address the scientific, logistical and managerial challenges posed by creating the SST data products and services within the Project.
The overall aim of the GHRSST is to provide the best quality sea surface temperature data for applications in short, medium and decadal/climate time scales in the most cost effective and efficient manner through international collaboration and scientific innovation.
Formerly known as the The Global Ocean Data Assimilation Experiment (GODAE) High Resolution SST Pilot Project (GHRSST-PP), it was initially founded in 2002 as an international collaboration for ocean forecasting activities to address an emerging need for accurate high resolution sea surface temperature (SST) products. Today the GHRSST is a truly international project with over $18 Million US invested across all of the project activities that deliver SST data products from a number of different satellite sensors. It orchestrates a wide variety of GHRSST data streams input and output data that must be shared, indexed, processed, quality controlled, analyzed and documented within an international framework called the Regional/Global Task Sharing (R/GTS) framework.
Large volumes of data and data services must be harnessed together to deliver the new generation of global coverage high resolution SST data sets that meet the GHRSST User Requirements. A basic 'version-1.0' of the R/GTS framework has been implemented in an internationally distributed manner. GHRSST data products Global and regional coverage SST data products are now produced by GHRSST RDAC Regional Data Assembly Centers (RDACs) in Australia, Japan, USA and Europe. RDAC SST Products are passed in near real time to the operational GHRSST GDAC Global Data Assembly Center (GDAC) at the NASA JPL PO.DAAC where the are integrated together and served to the global application community. The GDAC plays an essential role in GHRSST quality control and data and metadata management. Over 30 GB of data are exchanged within the international project each day!