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Full catalog/G18-ABI-L2P-ACSPO-v2.90
G18-ABI-L2P-ACSPO-v2.90·v2.90·dataset

How warm the sea surface is off western America (GOES-18)

GHRSST L2P NOAA/ACSPO GOES-18/ABI West America Region Sea Surface Temperature v2.90 dataset
ocean NASA POCLOUD Level 2P netCDF-4
In plain English

What it measures. How warm the sea surface is off the west coast of the Americas, reported as both a just-below-the-surface and a depth temperature, kept along the satellite's original swath rather than a regular grid.

How it's made. Produced from the ABI imager on the GOES-18 weather satellite using NOAA's ACSPO system, scanning a wide disk of Earth every 10 minutes and collating into hourly files.

How & where you'd use it. Supports weather forecasting and ocean and climate monitoring; near-real-time files are later replaced by more carefully processed delayed-mode files.

What's measured

OCEANS › OCEAN TEMPERATURE › SEA SURFACE TEMPERATUREOCEANS › OCEAN TEMPERATURE › SEA SURFACE TEMPERATURE › SEA SURFACE SUBSKIN TEMPERATURE

Coverage & cadence

  • Time span2022-06-07 → ongoing
  • Measured byGOES-18 (ABI)
  • Processing levelLevel 2P
  • Spatial extent163, -60, -77, 60
  • FormatsnetCDF-4
  • StatusACTIVE

What you can do with it

  • Watch sea-surface temperature and marine heatwaves
  • Spot algal blooms and ocean-colour shifts
  • Support fisheries and coastal monitoring
Official description

The G18-ABI-L2P-ACSPO-v2.90 dataset produced by the NOAA ACSPO system is used to derive Subskin and Depth Sea Surface Temperature (SST) from the ABI onboard the G18 satellite. NOAA’s G18 (aka, GOES-T pre-launch) was launched on March 1, 2022, replacing the G17 as GOES West in Jan'2023. It is the third satellite in the US GOES–R Series, the Western Hemisphere’s most sophisticated weather-observing and environmental-monitoring system. The ABI is the primary instrument on the GOES-R Series for imaging Earth’s weather, oceans, and environment. G18/ABI maps SST in a Full Disk (FD) area from 163E-77W and 60S-60N, with a spatial resolution of 2km/nadir to 15km/VZA 67-deg, and 10-min temporal sampling. The 10-min FD data are subsequently collated in time, to produce the 1-hr product, with improved coverage and reduced cloud leakages and image noise. The L2P is produced in netCDF4 GDS2 format, with 24 granules per day, and a total data volume 0.8 GB/day. The near-real time (NRT) data are updated hourly, with several hours latency. The NRT files are replaced with Delayed Mode (DM) files, with a latency of ~2-months. File names remain unchanged, and DM vs NRT can be identified by different time stamps and global attributes inside the files (MERRA instead of GFS for atmospheric profiles, and same day CMC L4 analyses in DM instead of one-day delayed in NRT processing). Pixel earth locations are not reported in the granules, as they remain unchanged from granule to granule. Those can be obtained using a flat lat/lon file or a Python script available at Documents tab under How-To section. The ACSPO G18 ABI SSTs are validated against quality controlled in situ data from the NOAA iQuam system (Xu and Ignatov, 2014) and continuously monitored in NOAA SQUAM system (Dash et al, 2010). A 0.02-deg equal-angle gridded L3C product 0.7GB/day) is available at https://podaac.jpl.nasa.gov/dataset/G18-ABI-L3C-ACSPO-v2.90

Get the data

g18-abi-l2p-acspo-v2.90_access.py
import earthaccess
earthaccess.login(strategy="netrc")          # free Earthdata Login

results = earthaccess.search_data(
    short_name="G18-ABI-L2P-ACSPO-v2.90",
    version="2.90",
    bounding_box=(-122.5, 37.2, -121.8, 37.9),  # your area (W,S,E,N)
    temporal=("2024-01-01", "2024-12-31"),       # your dates
)
files = earthaccess.open(results)   # stream straight from POCLOUD
Browsing CMR needs no login. Downloading or streaming bytes needs a free Earthdata Login + the earthaccess package.