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MODIS Terra Level 3 SST MID-IR 8 day 4km Nighttime V2019.0

Metadata Updated: September 19, 2025

Day and night spatially gridded (L3) global NASA skin sea surface temperature (SST) products from the Moderate-resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) onboard the Terra satellite. Average daily, weekly (8 day), monthly and annual skin SST products are available at both 4.63 and 9.26 km spatial resolution. Terra was launched by NASA on December 18, 1999, into a sun synchronous, polar orbit with a daylight descending node at 10:30 am, to study the global dynamics of the Earth atmosphere, land and oceans. The MODIS captures data in 36 spectral bands at a variety of spatial resolutions. Two SST products can be present in these files. The first is a skin SST produced for both 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 with SST derived from heritage and current NASA sensors. At night, a second SST product is produced using the mid-infrared 3.95 and 4.05 micron channels which are unique to MODIS; the SST derived from these measurements is identified as SST4. The SST4 product has lower uncertainty, but due to sun glint can only be produced at night. To generate the L3 products the L2 pixels are binned into an integerized sinusoidal area grid (ISEAG) and mapped into an equidistant cylindrical (also known as Platte Carre) projection. Additional projection detailed can be found at https://oceancolor.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/format/ The NASA MODIS L3 SST data products are generated by the NASA Ocean Biology Processing Group (OBPG) Peter Minnett and his team at the Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science (RSMAS) are responsible for sea surface temperature algorithm development, error statistics and quality flagging. JPL acquires and distributes MODIS ocean L3 SST data from the OBPG as the official Physical Oceanography Data Archive (PO.DAAC) for SST. The R2019 superseded the previous v2014.1 datasets which can be found at https://doi.org/10.5067/MODTM-8D4N4

Access & Use Information

Public: This dataset is intended for public access and use. License: No license information was provided. If this work was prepared by an officer or employee of the United States government as part of that person's official duties it is considered a U.S. Government Work.

Downloads & Resources

Dates

Metadata Created Date April 11, 2025
Metadata Updated Date September 19, 2025

Metadata Source

Harvested from NASA Data.json

Additional Metadata

Resource Type Dataset
Metadata Created Date April 11, 2025
Metadata Updated Date September 19, 2025
Publisher NASA/JPL/PODAAC;OBPG
Maintainer
Identifier 10.5067/MODTM-8D4N9
Data Last Modified 2025-09-11
Category Earth Science
Public Access Level public
Bureau Code 026:00
Metadata Context https://project-open-data.cio.gov/v1.1/schema/catalog.jsonld
Schema Version https://project-open-data.cio.gov/v1.1/schema
Catalog Describedby https://project-open-data.cio.gov/v1.1/schema/catalog.json
Harvest Object Id 023501d4-2396-455c-8093-5340aae2aae0
Harvest Source Id 58f92550-7a01-4f00-b1b2-8dc953bd598f
Harvest Source Title NASA Data.json
Homepage URL https://podaac.jpl.nasa.gov/CitingPODAAC
Old Spatial "CARTESIAN",{"NorthBoundingCoordinate":90.0,"WestBoundingCoordinate":-180.0,"EastBoundingCoordinate":180.0,"SouthBoundingCoordinate":-90.0}
Program Code 026:000
Source Datajson Identifier True
Source Hash 19401c728640fe5e7f1051e5c654ee45e4fc2d26fb7bf354712a8e9ed5509287
Source Schema Version 1.1
Spatial
Temporal 2000-02-24/2000-02-24

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