Table 6.
Key information about variables in SST CCI products.
| Description of the content of key variables in the NetCDF files | Names of variables in files containing single (L2P) or gridded (L3U) orbits of data | Names of variables in files containing merged multi-sensor (L4) data |
|---|---|---|
| Latitudes of the data points | lat | lat |
| Longitudes of the data points | lon | lon |
| Sea surface temperature at the skin* using best available retrieval | sea_surface_temperature | N/A |
| Total uncertainty of the sea surface temperature at the skin*,# | sea_surface_temperature_total_uncertainty | N/A |
| Sea surface temperature at 20 cm depth and 10.30 am or pm local time | sea_surface_temperature_depth | N/A |
| Infilled daily-mean estimate of sea surface temperature at 20 cm depth | N/A | analysed_sst** |
| Total uncertainty of the sea surface temperature at 20 cm depth# | sea_surface_temperature_depth_total_uncertainty | analysed_sst_uncertainty |
| Sea surface temperature anomaly at 20 cm depth | sea_surface_temperature_depth_anomaly | |
| Quality level | l2p_flags | |
| Location type | N/A | mask**** |
| Fractional coverage of sea ice | N/A | sea_ice_fraction |
*Skin SST is the temperature of the radiating surface layer of the water, which is of order 10 µm depth.
**‘Analysis’ is the term used for the combination and interpolation of the SSTs from the orbit files; an alternative set of products is available where this variable is replaced with analysed_sst_anomaly.
***Good quality SSTs are those where the value in the SST data array is not −32768 and the value in the quality_level variable is 4 or 5.
****Ice-free ocean SST values have mask = 1.
#Also available in the files is uncertainty broken down into different components.