MODIS Aqua: Monthly Nighttime Sea Surface Temperature at 9km Resolution

Global sea surface temperature data derived from nighttime observations by the MODIS instrument on NASA's Aqua satellite. The dataset includes monthly averages at a 9.26 km spatial resolution, generated by the NASA Ocean Biology Processing Group and algorithm developers at RSMAS. Aqua was launched on May 4, 2002 and operates in a sun-synchronous orbit.

Use Cases

• Monitoring global ocean warming trends based on monthly averaged skin SST.
• Studying regional sea surface temperature anomalies based on 9km gridded data.
• Comparing SST derived from long-wave IR channels (NSST) with SST from mid-IR channels (SST4) mentioned in the description.
• Analyzing diurnal temperature cycles by comparing nighttime SST products with daytime counterparts.

Strengths

• Provides two distinct SST products (NSST and SST4) for nighttime observations.
• Offers data at a consistent 9.26 km spatial resolution.
• Generated by authoritative NASA teams (OBPG and RSMAS) with documented algorithm development.
• Supersedes a previous version (v2014.1), indicating ongoing refinement.

Limitations

• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Row count is unknown, which may limit suitability assessment.
• The SST4 product is limited to nighttime use due to sun glint, as mentioned in the description.

Provenance

Source

National Aeronautics and Space Administration

Collection Method

Spatially gridded (L3) products created by binning L2 pixels from MODIS Aqua satellite into an integerized sinusoidal area grid.

Freshness

Last updated 2026-03-13 00:26:42.299844; freshness should be verified.

Geography

Global