GHRSST Level 2P Global Sea Surface Skin Temperature from the Visible and Infrared Imager/Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) on the Suomi-NPP satellite (GDS2)

VIIRS uses on-board pixel aggregation to reduce the growth in size of pixels away from nadir. Two SST products are contained in these files. The first is a skin SST produced separately for day and night observations, derived from the long wave IR 11 and 12 micron wavelength channels, using a modified nonlinear SST algorithm intended to provide continuity of SST products from heritage and current NASA sensors.

At night, a second triple channel SST product is generated using the 3.7 , 11 and 12 micron IR channels, identified as SST_triple. Due to the sun glint in the 3.7 micron SST_triple can only be used at night. VIIRS L2P SST data have a 750 spatial resolution at nadir and are stored in ~288 five minute granules per day.

Full global coverage is obtained each day. The production of VIIRS NASA L2P SST files is part of the Group for High Resolution Sea Surface Temperature (GHRSST) project and is a joint collaboration between the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), the NASA Ocean Biology Processing Group (OBPG), and the Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science (RSMAS). Researchers at RSMAS were responsible for sea surface temperature algorithm development, error statistics and quality flagging, while the OBPG, as the NASA ground data system, is responsible for the production of VIIRS ocean products.

JPL acquires VIIRS ocean granules from the OBPG and reformats them to the GHRSST L2P netCDF specification with complete metadata and is the official Physical Oceanography Data Archive (PO.DAAC) for SST. In mid-August, 2018, the RSMAS involvement in the VIIRS SST project ceased, and the subsequent fields are not maintained.The R2016.2 supersedes the previous v2016.0 datasets which can be found at doi.org/10.5067/GHVRS-2PN16