The Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer (AVHRR) instrument flies on the
NOAA Polar Operational Environmental Satellites (POES) and the European
MetOp Satellites. AVHRR is used to image a large variety of Earth phenomena,
including vegetation, clouds, dust, snow, ice, fire, and surface temperature.
Sea surface temperature (SST) is generated in near real-time using AVHRR's
infrared channels by NOAA/NESDIS from High Resolution Picture Transmission
(HRPT) overpasses (1.1 km at nadir) using Seaspace's TeraScan software and
NOAA's multi-channel regression algorithm (Li et al., 2001a & 2001b). With
the various satellite instances, overpasses occur at roughly 1:30am,
9:30am, 1:30pm, 9:30pm (local time) per day.
The individual daytime and nighttime SST scenes from each operational POES
and MetOp satellite are composited by NOAA CoastWatch into daily combined
day-night mean grids for the U.S. east coast (at approximately 1.25 km).
The daily gridded scenes are then composited into 3-day, 7-day, monthly,
seasonal and annual average grids. The data time series spans 2008 to the
present.
Data users may also opt to use a newer SST data set
AVHRR-VIIRS Multi-sensor Composite SST,
which features improved algorithms and a slightly finer spatial resolution,
among several other dataset differences.
References:
Li, X., W. Pichel, E. Maturi, P. Clemente-Colon, J. Sapper. 2001. Deriving the
operational nonlinear multichannel sea surface temperature algorithm
coefficients for NOAA-15 AVHRR/3, International Journal of Remote Sensing,
vol. 22, no. 4, pp. 699-704.
Li., X., W. Pichel, P. Clemente-Colon, V. Krasnopolsky, J. Sapper. 2001.
Validation of coastal sea and lake surface temperature measurements derived
from NOAA/AVHRR data. International Journal of Remote Sensing, vol. 22, no. 7,
pp. 1285-1303.
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