The NOAA 1/4° Daily Optimum Interpolation Sea Surface Temperature

Description

The NOAA 1/4 degree Daily Optimum Interpolation Sea Surface Temperature (OISST) is a long term Climate Data Record that incorporates observations from different platforms (satellites, ships, buoys and Argo floats) into a regular global grid. The dataset is interpolated to fill gaps on the grid and create a spatially complete map of sea surface temperature. Satellite and ship observations are referenced to buoys to compensate for platform differences and sensor biases.

OISST v2.1 replaced v2 on April 1, 2020. V2 stopped production on April 26, 2020 after its input datasets were discontinued. Data are currently available from September 1, 1981—present, and updated every day. V2.1 has significant quality improvements for data from January 1, 2016 onward.

Note: For September 1981—December 2015, data for SST and SST anomaly are the same as v2, but have been updated from netCDF3 to netCDF4 with updated metadata in v2.1.

More information and a detailed description of the algorithm and data sources used are available on the NASA OISST website.

The NCI local replica data is downloaded from ncei.noaa.gov using wget. This data is updated regularly, every ~1-2 days. Since the original daily files are relatively small in size (~1.6mb), they are then concatenated in yearly files using CDO and rechunked using NCO. Updates are run with a weekly frequency.

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/oisst/data/tmp/<year>/<files>  -- Daily files
• /g/data/ia39/aus-ref-clim-data-nci/oisst/data/yearly/<files> -- Yearly files 

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:

Huang, Boyin; Liu, Chunying; Banzon, Viva F.; Freeman, Eric; Graham, Garrett; Hankins, Bill; Smith, Thomas M.; Zhang, Huai-Min. (2020): NOAA 0.25-degree Daily Optimum Interpolation Sea Surface Temperature (OISST), Version 2.1. [indicate subset used]. NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information. https://doi.org/10.25921/RE9P-PT57. Accessed [date]

Additional details