GHRSST Level 3C: North Atlantic Sea Surface Temperature from Metop/AVHRR

A Group for High Resolution Sea Surface Temperature (GHRSST) dataset for the North Atlantic Region derived from the Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer on the MetOp-B satellite. The European Organization for the Exploitation of Meteorological Satellites (EUMETSAT), Ocean and Sea Ice Satellite Application Facility (OSI SAF) produces this product in near real time, delivering four six-hourly collated files per day on a regular 2km grid. The product format is compliant with the GHRSST Data Specification (GDS) version 2.

Use Cases

• Modeling ocean heat content and climate patterns based on subskin sea surface temperature measurements.
• Validating regional climate models using near real-time satellite data from the North Atlantic.
• Analyzing diurnal temperature cycles based on the four-times-daily data delivery schedule.
• Studying spatial temperature gradients on a 2km resolution grid over the North Atlantic.

Strengths

• Data is produced in near real time, supporting timely analysis.
• Spatial resolution is specified as a regular 2km grid.
• Product is compliant with the standardized GHRSST Data Specification (GDS) version 2.

Limitations

• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Row count is unknown, which may limit suitability assessment for large-scale ML tasks.

Provenance

Source

European Organization for the Exploitation of Meteorological Satellites (EUMETSAT), Ocean and Sea Ice Satellite Application Facility (OSI SAF).

Collection Method

SST retrieved from AVHRR infrared channels using a multispectral algorithm, with global level 1b data acquired at Meteo-France/Centre de Meteorologie Spatiale.

Time Range

Data collection began after the MetOp-B platform launch on 17 Sep 2012.

Freshness

Last updated 2026-03-13 02:33:27.667681; freshness should be verified.

Geography

North Atlantic Region (NAR).