GOES-16 (G16) is the first satellite in the US NOAA third generation of Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellites (GOES), a.k.a. GOES-R series (which will also include -S, -T, and -U). G16 was launched on 19 Nov 2016 and initially placed in an interim position at 89.5-deg W, between GOES-East and -West. Upon completion of Cal/Val in Dec 2018, it was moved to its permanent position at 75.2-deg W, and declared NOAA operational GOES-East on 18 Dec 2018. NOAA is responsible for all GOES-R products, including Sea Surface Temperature (SST) from the Advanced Baseline Imager (ABI).

The Level 2 Preprocessed (L2P) SST product is derived at the native sensor resolution using NOAA Advanced Clear-Sky Processor for Ocean (ACSPO) system. ACSPO first processes every 10min FD data SSTs are derived from BTs using the ACSPO clear-sky mask (ACSM; Petrenko et al., 2010) and Non-Linear SST (NLSST) algorithm (Petrenko et al., 2014). Currently, only 4 longwave bands centered at 8.4, 10.3, 11.2, and 12.3 um are used (the 3.9 microns was initially excluded, to minimize possible discontinuities in the diurnal cycle). The regression is tuned against quality controlled in situ SSTs from drifting and tropical mooring buoys in the NOAA iQuam system (Xu and Ignatov, 2014). The 10-min FD data are subsequently collated in time, to produce 1-hr L2P product, with improved coverage, and reduced cloud leakages and image noise, compared to each individual 10min image. In the collated L2P, SSTs and BTs are only reported in clear-sky water pixels (defined as ocean, sea, lake or river, and up to 5 km inland) and fill values elsewhere. All pixels with valid SSTs are recommended for use. The L2P is reported in netCDF4 GHRSST Data Specification version 2 (GDS2) format, 24 granules per 24hr interval, with a total data volume of 0.6GB/day. 

The L3C (Level 3 Collated) product is a gridded version of the ACSPO G16/ABI L2P product available at https://podaac.jpl.nasa.gov/dataset/ABI_G16-STAR-L2P-v2.70. The L3C output files are 1hr granules in netCDF4 format, compliant with the GHRSST Data Specification version 2 (GDS2). There are 24 granules per 24hr interval, with a total data volume of 0.2GB/day.