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Introduction
The Operational Sea Surface Temperature and Ice Analysis (OSTIA) system produces high resolution analysis and intercomparison products for the sea surface temperature (SST) of the global ocean from satellite and and insitu data.
Products include foundation SST (the SST from which the diurnal cycle grows), hourly skin SST and the Group for High Resolution SST (GHRSST) Multi-Product Ensemble (GMPE).
Data are made available in netCDF file format following the GHRSST data specification. Near real time and historical reprocessings are available.
More about the different types of SST, GMPE and the GHRSST file specification can be found at the GHRSST website (external link).
 
Latest SSTs and sea ice concentrations [View at full size by clicking on the images or using these links: SSTs and ice concentrations].
The sections below describe how to obtain the data and provide links to visualisations and monitoring information.
Data availability
Data are available from:
The Met Office Marine Data Service.
The Copernicus Marine Environment Monitoring Service (CMEMS) (external link).
The Physical Oceanography Distributed Active Archive Center (PODAAC) which is managed by the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (external link).
The European Space Agency (ESA) (external link).
The Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) (external link).
The links in the table below provide documentation on how to use the data, visualisation and different download mechanisms. Please check these links for the data licence and references to cite if using the data.
| Product |
Description |
Download links |
| Foundation SST analyses |
Daily ocean and lake temperatures and ice concentrations on a 1/20 degree regular grid. Anomalies, satellite bias estimates and monthly and seasonal average temperatures are also available on a 1/4 degree regular grid. |
Met Office Marine Data Service
CMEMS data link (external link)
PODAAC data link (external link)
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| Diurnal skin SST analyses |
Hourly skin SST analyses on a 1/4 degree grid. |
Not currently available. |
| GHRSST multi-product ensemble (GMPE) |
An ensemble of SST analyses produced across the world, including gradients for each, an ensemble median and an ensemble standard deviation on a 1/4 degree grid. |
Not currently available. |
| Reprocessed foundation SST analyses |
A historical reprocessing of foundation SST; designed for users who wish to have a long, consistently processed version of the near real time foundation SST product. |
CMEMS data link (external link)
PODAAC data link (external link)
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| Reprocessed 20 cm daily average SSTs |
Produced for the European Space Agency Climate Change Initiative (ESA CCI) and covering the period September 1981 to December 2016.
A daily climatology (1982 - 2010 average) is also available.
The data and an extension to the present are available from C3S and CMEMS.
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ESA data link (external link)
CMEMS data link (external link)
C3S data link (external link)
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SST visualisation and monitoring
Browse the latest SST data: foundation SST and anomaly plots.
A selection of monitoring plots generated from outputs from the OSTIA foundation SST generation can be found here.
Monitoring plots derived from the GMPE outputs can be found here.
Validation of the analyses used in GMPE can be found here.
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