Source/sensor: Tiros-N/NOAA Advanced Very-High-Resolution Radiometer (AVHRR), NDBC, Japanese and TOGA-TAO moored buoys; AOML and MEDS drifting buoys

Coverage: 1988 - 1998, global

Abstract: This summary is intended to cover information for versions 17,18 and 19 of the pathfinder matchup database. The AVHRR Oceans Pathfinder SST and buoy matchup data contains the in-situ moored and drifting buoy data that is used to calibrate the Pathfinder satellite sea surface temperatures. In addition the data set contains ancillary data such as the closest pixel satellite sea surface temperature retrieval, the Reynolds OI field and the channel brightness radiances. The data is in ascii and maybe easily read using code provided. The data is available either through the FTP PODAAC account or through exabyte tape. Each record contains 195 fields. For a description of these fields see Podesta et al., 1997. The fields include the in-situ data for that particular buoy along with the AVHRR sea surface temperatures within a 5x5 pixel box closest to the buoy. Ancillary data includes the wind speed from the SSMI sensor and the Reynolds optimally interpolated SST closest to the matchup location. The guide document maybe obtained by accessing the pathfinder homepage through the WWW with the URL http://podaac.jpl.nasa.gov/sst/. This guide covers information for PODAAC products 069 and 089. This corresponds to version 1.0,3.0 and version 4.0,4.1 of the pathfinder algorithms respectively. More detailed information for version 17, 18 of the Pathfinder matchup database may be found under: http://www.rsmas.miami.edu/~gui/v18/matchups.v18.html. while for version 19 it may be found under: http://www.rsmas.miami.edu/groups/rrsl/pathfinder/Matchups/match_index.html.

Read software for these two versions is different and may be found under the FTP site.

Data Set Vol: Approximately ~1GB

Smallest order: One file (linux compressed)

Std. Product: ftp://podaac.jpl.nasa.gov/pub/sea_surface_temperature/avhrr/pathfinder/matchups

Formats: ASCII