GHRSST Level 2P Western Pacific Regional Skin Sea Surface Temperature from the Multifunctional Transport Satellite 2 (MTSAT-2) (GDS version 2)

Multi-functional Transport Satellites (MTSAT) are a series of geostationary weather satellites operated by the Japan Meteorological Agency (JMA). MTSAT carries an aeronautical mission to assist air navigation, plus a meteorological mission to provide imagery over the Asia-Pacific region for the hemisphere centered on 140 East. The meteorological mission includes an imager giving nominal hourly full Earth disk images in five spectral bands (one visible, four infrared). MTSAT are spin stabilized satellites. With this system images are built up by scanning with a mirror that is tilted in small successive steps from the north pole to south pole at a rate such that on each rotation of the satellite an adjacent strip of the Earth is scanned. It takes about 25 minutes to scan the full Earth's disk. This builds a picture 10,000 pixels for the visible images (1.25 km resolution) and 2,500 pixels (4 km resolution) for the infrared images. The MTSAT-2 (also known as Himawari 7) and its radiometer (MTSAT-2 Imager) was successfully launched on 18 February 2006. For this Group for High Resolution Sea Surface Temperature (GHRSST) dataset, skin sea surface temperature (SST) measurements are calculated from the IR channels of the MTSAT-2 Imager full resolution data in satellite projection on a hourly basis by using Bayesian Cloud Mask algorithm at the Office of Satellite and Product Operations (OSPO). L2P datasets including Single Sensor Error Statistics (SSES) are then derived following the GHRSST Data Processing Specification (GDS) version 2.0.