Summary

Description

This accession contains a set of sea surface temperature climatologies for the Gulf of Mexico (GOM), derived from the AVHRR Pathfinder Version 5 sea surface temperature data set (http://pathfinder.nodc.noaa.gov). These GOM climatologies were produced from 5-day cloud-screened day-night averages of Pathfinder SST data from 1982-2009, which are archived at the National Oceanographic Data Center under separate accession numbers. In addition to sea surface temperature, the climatologies also include minimum, maximum, standard deviation, and number of observations. The climatologies are available as 32-bit Tagged Image File Format (.TIFF) data files for 1982-2009 and include seasonal and yearly time periods. The climatologies are also included as Arc Grid (.mxd) and .PNG layers with associated legends for user convenience and were assigned projection GCS_WGS_1984. An additional subdirectory contains the annual mean, season 1 (Jan-Mar) mean, season 2 (Apr -June) mean, season 3 (Jul - Sept) mean, and season 4 (Oct-Dec) mean as color-classified .PNG images with a matching shape file that we developed for use in online visualizations. A separate GOM land mask which will also display inland water bodies has been included with this accession. The land mask was developed from the Global Self-consistent, Hierarchical, High-resolution Shoreline Database v2.2.0 product (Wessel and Smith, 2011). The user should note that although quality flags were assigned consistently for all water pixels, SSTs for inland water bodies (lakes and rivers) should be used with caution, as their accuracy has not been documented and there are numerous complexities involved with determining surface temperatures in inland regions.