JISAO data

National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) SeaWiFS ocean chlorophyll and marine aerosols
1997-2002


Introduction and analyses | Data



The Sea-viewing Wide Field-of-view Sensor (SeaWiFS) data products
include satellite estimates of marine chlorophyll and aerosols.  
The estimates of chlorophyll and aerosol are not independent, and this makes
it difficult to determine the role of iron fertilization of
chlorophyll with this data set.  The
NASA SeaWiFS home page is the entry to obtaining data or images, and it includes links to the data format, and beautiful high-spatial resolution images from this sensor.

All estimates provided on this WWW page are from the level 3b standard mapped images for September 1997 through early 2002. New algorithms are always being developed and additional observations have been taken. I will update this data set when I next work on this project.

Some analyses of the chlorophyll data are provided on this link. Some analyses of the aerosol data follow.

Global domain maps, see caption.
PostScript | PDF | JPEG | PNG
Aerosol annual mean and annual range in units of optical thickness. Based on data for 1998-2001, and all calendar months were required to contribute to calculate statistics. The highest annual mean and annual range of aerosol is found downwind of the Sahara desert, and to a lesser extent in the Arabian Sea. Maps of the individual calendar month climatologies are available as PostScript (55Mb) and PDF files.

Data(in netCDF format):
  • Monthly climatologies: aerosol (2.2Mb) | cholorphyll (3.1Mb)
    The files are different sizes so the spatial resolutions may not be the same.
  • Years and months in various resolutions
    0.5-degree latitude-longitude (37Mb): aerosol | chlorophyll
    1-degree latitude-longitude (9.3Mb): aerosol | chlorophyll
    2.5-degree latitude-longitude (1.5Mb): aerosol | chlorophyll
  • Years and pentads (5-day means):
    2.5-degree latitude-longitude resolution (9.2Mb): aerosol | chlorophyll

    
    

    April 2003
    Todd Mitchell ( mitchell@atmos.washington.edu )
    JISAO data