Tuesday, November 3, 2020

It has been discovered that the MODIS Aqua/Terra Level 2P/Level 3 sea surface temperature (SST) datasets produced since 1 September 2020 have an input error from the MERRA-2 auxiliary dataset used in the SST derivation for the “Refined” SST files.  These files will be reprocessed once the error is more well understood, but in the meantime they should not be used. Forward stream “Quicklook” or “NRT” files which use a different input for the SST derivation are unaffected.  L2P “Refined” files can be determined by inspecting the global header “comment:” attribute which will contain the word “Refined”.  For L3 files they will not have “NRT” as part of the end of the filename.