GHRSST Level 2P Gridded Global Subskin Sea Surface Temperature from the Advanced Scanning Microwave Radiometer - Earth Observing System (AMSR-E) on the NASA Aqua Satellite (GDS version 1)

The Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer (AMSR-E) was launched on 4 May 2002, aboard NASA's Aqua spacecraft. The National Space Development Agency of Japan (NASDA) provided AMSR-E to NASA as an indispensable part of Aqua's global hydrology mission. Over the oceans, AMSR-E is measuring a number of important geophysical parameters, including sea-surface temperature (SST), wind speed, atmospheric water vapor, cloud water, and rain rate. A key feature of AMSR-E is its capability to see through clouds, thereby providing an uninterrupted view of global SST and surface wind fields. Remote Sensing Systems (RSS, or REMSS) is the provider of these SST data for the Group for High Resolution Sea Surface Temperature (GHRSST) Project. Although the product designation is "L2P_GRIDDED" it is in actuality a Level 3 Collated (L3C) product as defined in the GHRSST Data Processing Specification (GDS) version 2.0. Its "L2P_GRIDDED" name derives from a deprecated specification in the early Pilot Project phase of GHRSST (pre 2008) and has remained for file naming continuity. In this dataset, both ascending (daytime) and descending (daytime) gridded orbital passes on packaged into the same daily file.