Pacific Fisheries Environmental Laboratory | |
SST Monthly Means and AnomaliesNOTICE: You may soon notice a change (in appearance only) to these Internet web pages as we upgrade and improve our site in the coming weeks. The data products themselves will of course remain unchanged. Thank you. Monthly means in 1-degree lat/lon squares of sea surface temperature and anomalies are posted on PFEL's Live Access Server and as monthly anomaly maps a few days after the first of every month. They were computed from GTS surface observations received twice a day by ERD from FNMOC (Fleet Numerical Meteorology and Oceanography Center). These are global real-time surface observations from platforms such as ships and buoys (both fixed and drifting). They are a subset of the data which will be included in an update to COADS (Comprehensive Ocean-Atmosphere Data Set, also see COADS on CD-ROM) . The available variables are as follows:
Please note that these are observational data. No analysis has been performed on the data other than the averaging and trimming described above. Users needing more complete coverage may use one of the many interpolated products available (for example see the Climate Modeling Branch SST Analyses page ). Technical note: The GTS data received from FNMOC is in the extremely cumbersome BUFR format. The software provided to read the data is large, complicated, and slow to run. We convert the data to HDF-EOS structure which allows quick extracts of the data and greatly reduces file sizes. The raw data is then read from the HDF-EOS file, means and anomalies are calculated, and the results are stored in a NetCDF file as required by the visualization program FERRET which is used by the Live Access Server. |