NASA’s Physical Oceanography Distributed Active Archive Center (PO.DAAC) released the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)/STAR Group for High Resolution Sea Surface Temperature (GHRSST) Level 3S (super-collated) version 2.81 Sea Surface Temperature (SST) datasets, produced from the Low Earth Orbiting (LEO) JPSS (NPP, N20, N21), Metop-FG (Metop-A, B C) and NASA (Aqua, Terra) satellites.
The L3S-LEO is a family of global multi-sensor L3S gridded 0.02º resolution SST products. The L3S-LEO-PM (afternoon orbit) SST is derived from the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) aboard JPSS satellites (NPP, N20, and N21) and the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) aboard Aqua, by collating individual satellite Advanced Clear-Sky Processor for Ocean (ACSPO) L3U SST data. It comprises 2 daily files, day and night, corresponding to nominal local equator crossing times around 01:30/13:30, respectively.
The L3S-LEO-DY (daily) further combines L3S-LEO-PM and AM SSTs, both day and night, from afternoon (PM; NPP, N20, N21, Aqua) and mid-morning orbit (AM; Metop-A, B, C) satellites, plus Terra MODIS between February 2, 2000 and December 12, 2021, into a single daily SST product.
The L3S-LEO-PM and DY datasets are produced with the NOAA enterprise Advanced Clear Sky Processor for Ocean (ACSPO) v2.81 SST system, by the NOAA Center for Satellite Applications and Research (STAR). The datasets are formatted as netCDF-4, in compliance with the GHRSST Data Processing Specification version 2.0 (GDS2). Detailed information regarding the GHRSST Level 3S products are available from the GHRSST website and data is available in the Earthdata catalog. View a related animation from 2024.
The near-real time (NRT) data are produced with a 3-6 hours latency, and then replaced with Re-ANalysis (RAN) files, within ~2-months. Both datasets are described and discoverable via the dataset landing pages and accessible via the Cloud OPeNDAP and Harmony API services. We recommend users to download the data with the podaac-data-subscriber Python tool.
DOI
- L3S_LEO_PM-STAR-v2.81 doi:10.5067/GHLPM-3S281
- L3S_LEO_DY-STAR-v2.81 doi:10.5067/GHLDY-3S281
References
Jonasson, O, Gladkova, I., Ignatov, A., Kihai, Y. 2022: Towards global daily gridded super-collated SST product from low earth orbiting satellites (L3S-LEO-Daily) at NOAA. SPIE Defense + Commercial Sensing 2022, 12118. doi:10.1117/12.2620103
Jonasson, O, Gladkova, I., Ignatov, A., Kihai, Y. 2021: Algorithmic improvements and consistency checks of the NOAA global gridded super-collated SSTs from low Earth orbiting satellites ACSPO L3S-LEO. SPIE Defense + Commercial Sensing 2021, 11752. doi:10.1117/12.2585819
Jonasson, O., Ignatov, A., Pryamitsyn, V., Petrenko, B., Kihai, Y. 2022: JPSS VIIRS SST Reanalysis Version 3, Remote Sens., 14, 3476. doi:10.3390/rs14143476
Jonasson, O., Ignatov, A., Pryamitsyn, V., Petrenko, B., Kihai, Y. 2023: NOAA MODIS SST Reanalysis Version 1. Remote Sens., 15(23), 5589. doi:10.3390/rs15235589
If you have questions, please contact PO.DAAC user services or visit PO.DAAC on Earthdata Forum.