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