GHRSST L3C NOAA/ACSPO GOES-18/ABI America Region Sea Surface Temperature v2.90 dataset

The G18-ABI-L3C-ACSPO-v2.90 dataset produced by the NOAA Advanced Clear Sky Processor for Ocean (ACSPO) system is used to derive Sea Surface Skin Temperature (SST) from he Advanced Baseline Imager (ABI) onboard the GOES-18 satellite. NOAA’s GOES-18 (aka, GOES-T) was launched on March 1, 2022, replacing GOES-17 as GOES West in January 2023. It is the third satellite in the geostationary GOES–R Series, the Western Hemisphere’s most sophisticated weather-observing and environmental-monitoring system. The Advanced Baseline Imager (ABI) is the primary instrument on the GOES-R Series for imaging Earth’s weather, oceans, and environment.


The G18-ABI-L3C-ACSPO-v2.90 dataset is a gridded version of the G18-ABI-L2P-ACSPO-v2.90 dataset (https://podaac.jpl.nasa.gov/dataset/G18-ABI-L2P-ACSPO-v2.90). The L3C (Level 3 Collated) output files reported hourly, 24 granules per day, with a daily volume of 1.2 GB/day. Valid SSTs are found over oceans, sea, lakes or rivers, with fill values reported elsewhere. All valid SSTs in L3C are recommended for users, although data over internal waters may not have enough in situ data to be adequately validated. Per GDS2 specifications, two additional Sensor-Specific Error Statistics layers (bias and standard deviation) are reported in each pixel with valid SST.


The ACSPO G18/ABI L3C product is continuously monitored and validated against iQuam in situ data (Xu and Ignatov, 2014) in SQUAM (Dash et al, 2010). The NRT files are replaced with Delayed Mode (DM) files, with a latency of ~2-months. File names remain unchanged, and DM vs NRT can be identified by different time stamps and global attributes inside the files (MERRA instead of GFS for atmospheric profiles, and same day CMC L4 analyses in DM instead of one-day delayed in NRT processing).