POES AVHRR Aerosol/Sea Surface Temperature Observations

POES AVHRR Aerosol/Sea Surface Temperature Observations is digital data set DSI-9614, archived at the National Climatic Data Center (NCDC). NOAA has been producing sea surface temperatures (SSTs) from satellite data since 1972. Monitoring of SST from earth-orbiting infrared radiometers has had a wide impact on oceanographic science. Currently, one of the principal sources of infrared data for SST measurement is from the Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer (AVHRR) carried on NOAA's Polar Orbiting Environmental Satellites (POES), beginning in 1978. AVHRR is a broad-band, four or five channel (depending on the model) scanner, sensing in the visible, near-infrared, and thermal infrared portions of the electromagnetic spectrum. The POES satellite system offers the advantage of daily global coverage, by making near-polar orbits roughly 14.1 times daily. In-situ SSTs, from buoys (drifting and moored) are used operationally to maintain accuracy -- removing any biases, and compiling statistics with time. In DSI-9614, each aerosol observation file contains eight days of SST observations containing an optical thickness parameter calculated from the Griggs algorithm. The SSTs in these observations are "aerosol- corrected" SSTs, but the uncorrected SSTs are also contained within the observation.