Data Dictionary (English, French, PDF)

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2026-03-24

Description: Night-time sea surface temperature (SST) was retrieved from the MODIS instrument on the Aqua satellite, with data distributed by the NASA Ocean Biology Processing Group, and averaged into monthly climatological composites. The data span the years 2003-2020; records were created at 1 km pixel resolution to be consistent with other satellite products. Methods: MODIS-Aqua night long-wave Sea Surface Temperature (SST) images were acquired from the NASA Ocean Biology Processing Group at processing Level-2 (version 2018), 1-km resolution, spanning the period 2003-01-01 to 2020-12-31. Image pixels were aligned and mapped to a regular grid using the SeaDAS program, retaining all pixels with a quality level of ‘1’ or lower, which is recommended for scientific analysis. The monthly mean value at all pixels was calculated for individual years, and used to produce maps of the monthly climatological mean and standard deviation of SST. Additionally, the number of occurrences of valid data at each pixel over the period of observation were calculated. Pixels with fewer than two occurrences over the entire period of observation were removed from these maps, and set to a NaN value in…

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