AVHRR Pathfinder version 5.0 global 4km sea surface temperature (SST) climatologies for 1985-2001

The 4 km Pathfinder effort at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) National Oceanographic Data Center (NODC) and the University of Miami's Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science (RSMAS) is an extension of and improvement on the sea surface temperature (SST) fields from the NOAA/NASA AVHRR Oceans 9km Pathfinder dataset. In this 4 km Pathfinder project, some important shortcomings in the original 9 km data have been corrected, and the entire time series has been reprocessed at the 4 km Global Area Coverage (GAC) level, the highest resolution possible globally. Pathfinder AVHRR SST data for daily, 5-day, 7-day, 8-day, monthly, and yearly periods from 1981-2008 are archived at the National Oceanographic Data Center under separate accession numbers. The SST climatologies are available as Hierarchical Data Format (.HDF) data files for 1985-2001 and include daily, 5-day, 7-day, 8-day, monthly, yearly, and seasonal time periods which are filed as separate NODC accessions. Four corresponding graphics (climatologies) in GeoTIFF format are provided for the seasonal climatologies. Although the data are represented using 16-bit in the .HDF files, 8-bit GeoTIFF files were developed to facilitate access and use of these data by the widest variety of users. As a result, the GeoTIFF representations of the .HDF files are not a complete representation of the data in the .HDF files.