SST CCI is a collaboration of 9 partner institutions. The team brings together European expertise in creating climate quality records of ocean temperatures from satellite data, with expertise in climate applications and computer engineering. Through the ESA funded Climate Change Initiative, the team have created a new, 20-yr climate record of global sea surface temperature (SST). Based on satellite data, this record is independent of thermometer based measurements from ships and buoys. The new climate SST record complements and challenges existing knowledge of how ocean temperatures have evolved.

The main dataset consists of stable, low-bias sea surface temperature (SST) data covering the period 08/1991 - 12/2010 (referred to as the Long Term Product).

Access to ESA CCI SST data is made available to all registered users under a Creative Commons Licence by attribution.

To download these data, you are invited to register as a NEODC user. This online registration only takes a few minutes.

The authors request an acknowledgement of the data source (cite both dataset DOI and the Geoscience Data Journal article indicated in the abstract above) if they are used in any publication.

The L2P Data from the series of Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer (AVHRR) sensors consist of a single orbit per file on an irregular grid with grid cell spacing about 4 km. These start in September 1991. Each file contains two sets of SSTs. The first set provides a measure of the temperature of the skin of the water at the time it was observed; the second set are estimates of the temperature at 20 cm depth and at either 1030 h or 2230 h local time. Each SST has associated with it a total uncertainty estimate, and uncertainty estimates for various contributions to that total uncertainty.

The data are stored in NetCDF-4 format files. Data arrays in NetCDF files are known as ‘variables’ and each variable has metadata stored with it. Please read the ESA CCI SST Product User Guide, available here before using the data. There is also a Quick Start Guide here.

Access to the ESA SST CCI AVHRR L2P long term product is available through our data browser here or via ftp at /neodc/esacci_sst/data/lt/AVHRR

If you have queries about these pages or about obtaining the ESA CCI SST data from NEODC/CEMS/CEDA then you should contact CEDA Support. Your query should be answered within one working day. When follow-up work is required, the CEMS/CEDA support will carry out the work as quickly and efficiently as possible, and in any case, the user will be kept informed of progress. If you have any questions concerning scientific issues such as details of the retrieval algorithm, or characteristics of the data then you should contact the ESA SST CCI science leader.