GHRSST NOAA/OSPO Level 2P Global Subskin Sea Surface Temperature version 2.1 from the Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer 2 (AMSR2) on the GCOM-W satellite (GDS version 2) for 2025-06-01 (NCEI Accession 0304890)

This product provides a Level-2 Sea Surface Temperature (SST) for the Group for High Resolution Sea Surface Temperature (GHRSST) Project, which is derived from the Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer 2 (AMSR2) by the NESDIS/STAR ocean winds science team led by Paul Chang and processed on the NESDIS Common Cloud Framework (NCCF). AMSR2 was launched on 18 May 2012, onboard the Global Change Observation Mission - Water (GCOM-W) satellite developed by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA). The GCOM-W mission aims to establish the global and long-term observation system to collect data, which is needed to understand mechanisms of climate and water cycle variations, and demonstrate its utilization. AMSR2 onboard the first generation of the GCOM-W satellite continues Aqua/AMSR-E observations of water vapor, cloud liquid water, precipitation, SST, sea surface wind speed, sea ice concentration, snow depth, and soil moisture. AMSR2 is a remote sensing instrument for measuring weak microwave emission from the surface and the atmosphere of the Earth. The antenna of AMSR2 rotates once per 1.5 seconds and obtains data over a 1450 km swath. This conical scan mechanism enables AMSR2 to acquire a set of daytime and nighttime data with more than 99% coverage of the Earth every 2 days. This product is generated by a set of fast, operationally oriented regression-based algorithms based partly on AMSR-E product heritage. The GCOM-W1 AMSR-2 Algorithm Software Processor (GAASP) takes the full orbital JAXA L1B data via NASA, applies brightness temperature bias corrections, assigns an RFI flag, performs internal reformatting, and then generates L2 products.