Hadley Centre Sea Ice and Sea Surface Temperature data set

Description

The Met Office Hadley Centre's sea ice and sea surface temperature (SST) data set, HadISST4, consists of monthly globally-complete fields of SST and sea ice concentration on a 1 degree latitude-longitude grid from 1870 to date.

The SST data are taken from the Met Office Marine Data Bank (MDB), which from 1982 onwards also includes data received through the Global Telecommunications System (GTS). In order to enhance data coverage, monthly median SSTs for 1871-1995 from the Comprehensive Ocean-Atmosphere Data Set (COADS) (now ICOADS) were also used where there were no MDB data. The sea ice data are taken from a variety of sources including digitized sea ice charts and passive microwave retrievals.

HadISST1 temperatures are reconstructed using a two stage reduced-space optimal interpolation procedure, followed by superposition of quality-improved gridded observations onto the reconstructions to restore local detail. The sea ice fields are made more homogeneous by compensating satellite microwave-based sea ice concentrations for the impact of surface melt effects on retrievals in the Arctic and for algorithm deficiencies in the Antarctic, and by making the historical in situ concentrations consistent with the satellite data. SSTs near sea ice are estimated using statistical relationships between SST and sea ice concentration.

The authors recommended you read the paper referenced in the citation before using the data.

More information is available from the HadISST website.

The NCI local copy was downloaded in netCDF format from the HadISST download page

Local host (English)

Available at NCI as part of the Australian Community Reference Climate Data Collection at:

• /g/data/ia39/aus-ref-clim-data-nci/hadisst/data/

To join project:

• https://my.nci.org.au/mancini/login?next=/mancini/project/ia39

Can also be accessed via the collection intake catalogue: 

• https://github.com/aus-ref-clim-data-nci/acs-replica-intake 

Access information (English)

Preferred citation:

Rayner, N. A.; Parker, D. E.; Horton, E.B.; Folland, C. K.; Alexander, L. V.; Rowell, D. P.; Kent, E. C.; Kaplan, A. (2003) Global analyses of sea surface temperature, sea ice, and night marine air temperature since the late nineteenth century J. Geophys. Res.Vol. 108, No. D14, 4407 doi:10.1029/2002JD002670

Additional details