JISAO data
Extended reconstructed sea surface temperature (ERSST)
1854 - October 2007

Analyses | Data
Tom Smith, Dick Reynolds, and collaborators produce the extended reconstructed sea surface temperature data set (ERSST), and NCDC has a nice WWW page documenting this data set. This is version 3 of the data.

From the documentation file:
ERSST.v3 is an improved extended reconstruction over version 2. Most of the improvements are justified by testing with simulated data. The major differences are caused by the improved low-frequency (LF) tuning of ERSST.v3 which reduces the SST anomaly damping before 1930 using the optimized parameters. Beginning in 1985, ERSST.v3 is also improved by explicitly including bias-adjusted satellite infrared data from AVHRR.

One of the additional changes is that the low frequency 15-year filter uses data centered on the current year. If some of data for 15-year period has not yet been observed, it can, of course, not be used. However, with time these data will become available. Thus, there may be slight modifications of recent ERSST fields with time.
global domain
PostScript | JPEG
The standard deviation of SST anomalies for 1854-99, 1900-49, and 1950-97 are qualitatively similar. This analysis is derived from version 1 of the data.
Data:
netCDF format:
All errors in the netCDF files are due to Todd Mitchell.
The data resides at the JISAO at /home/disk/muggy/data/sst_ncdc/ersst
There are also netCDF files at the NCDC site (one file for each year and month for some reason).
  • monthly data for 1854 - 2007 (~59 Mb)
  • 1982-2000 climatology used to produce ERSST ---- this is the old climatology (ersstclim.nc)
  • landmask (1 land, 0 sea)
    ASCII format:
  • 1854 - last month

    Reference:
    Smith, T.M., R.W. Reynolds, T.C. Peterson, and J. Lawrimore 2007: Improvements to NOAA's Historical Merged Land-Ocean Surface Temperature Analysis (1880-2006). In press. J. Clim.
    October 2007
    Todd Mitchell ( mitchell@atmos.washington.edu )
    JISAO data