GOES-18 Satellite Sea Surface Temperature Data for West America Region

GOES-18 satellite data provides subskin and depth sea surface temperature measurements for the West America region from 163°E to 77°W and 60°S to 60°N. NOAA's ACSPO system produces 24 data granules daily, with a total volume of 0.8 GB/day, updated hourly in near-real-time. The satellite, launched in March 2022, replaced GOES-17 as the operational GOES West observatory in January 2023.

Use Cases

• Modeling diurnal warming cycles using the 10-minute temporal sampling of the Full Disk product.
• Assimilating subskin SST and depth SST fields into numerical weather prediction and ocean circulation models.
• Detecting marine heatwave events by analyzing the 2km nadir resolution temperature data over time.
• Validating satellite-derived SST against in-situ data from the NOAA iQuam system, as referenced in the dataset documentation.
• Monitoring cloud leakage and image noise reduction by comparing the 1-hour collated product to the 10-minute base data.

Strengths

• High temporal resolution with 10-minute sampling for the Full Disk area.
• Spatial resolution ranges from 2km at nadir to 15km at a 67-degree view zenith angle.
• Data is validated against quality-controlled in-situ data via the NOAA iQuam and SQUAM systems.

Limitations

• Pixel earth locations are not reported in granules, requiring a separate flat file or Python script for geolocation.
• Near-real-time data has a latency of several hours, and delayed mode data has a latency of approximately two months.
• The spatial coverage is limited to the West America region (163°E to 77°W, 60°S to -60°N), not global.

Provenance

Source

NOAA ACSPO system using the Advanced Baseline Imager (ABI) on the GOES-18 satellite.

Collection Method

Derived from satellite remote sensing measurements, collated and processed into Level 2 Preprocessed (L2P) netCDF4 files.

Time Range

Post-launch data from March 2022 onward, with GOES-18 becoming operational GOES West in January 2023.

Freshness

Near-real-time data is updated hourly; delayed mode data is produced with a ~2-month latency.

Geography

Full Disk area covering 163°E to 77°W longitude and 60°S to 60°N latitude (West America region).