Met Office - HadISST 1.1 - Global sea Ice Coverage and Sea Surface Temperature data (1870-present)

Latest News on 15th July 2009: The SSM/I satellite that is used to provide the data for the sea ice analysis in HadISST suffered a significant degradation in performance through January and February 2009. The problem affects HadISST fields from January 2009 and probably causes an underestimate of ice extent and concentration. For the time being, the Hadley Centre will continue to process the data in the usual manner, but users should realise that the fields should be treated with caution.

Introduction

This dataset contains Sea Surface Temperature climatologies (HadISST SST, Version 1.1) and Sea Ice coverage (HadISST ICE, Version 1.1).

HadISST v.1.1 replaces the GISST/GICE v.2.3b data sets ended in February 2003. HadISST has a different sea-ice analysis from GISST; as a consequence of this, the data will not be available until the 2nd of the month, 2 months afterwards (e.g. January's data will become available in March).

The data available is grouped into 2 sections:

Global Ocean Surface Temperature (HadISST_1.1_SST), a set of SST data in monthly 1° area grids, for 1870 to present.
Global sea-Ice content, (HadISST_1.1_ICE), monthly 1° grids of ice coverage for 1870 to present.

In situ sea surface observations and satellite derived estimates at the sea surface are included in the analysis. SST bucket corrections have been applied to gridded fields from 1870 through 1941. And a blend of satellite AVHRR (for SST), SSMI (for ice) and observations are used in the modern periods.

This data is provided by the Hadley Centre, Met Office.

Restricted Data Access

The Met Office wish to monitor the use of this data and require an acknowledgement of the data source if they are used in any publication. The online application for access to the Met Office HadISST data includes the Met Office Conditions of Use. Please note that the Met Office data sets are available for bona fide academic research only (sorry no undergraduates), on a per person per project basis (i.e. all members on a same project who will be using the data must individually apply for access to the data). If you wish to access the Met Office data for commercial or personal purposes, please contact the Met Office directly.

Your application for accessing the HadISST data will be processed within a day of receipt and you will receive a confirmation email. Provided your application is complete and fully meets the Met Office conditions, a web account will be activated to allow you access to the HadISST directories via your login account from the BADC WWW Archive pages or by FTP.

Please read the 00README file available under /badc/ukmo-hadisst/ directory to to guide you through the tree structure and the data directory.

Data File Format

The data held at the BADC, are stored in a simple ASCII format (plain text and "human" readable). Each ASCII file consists of one year of monthly data. Information relative to the file format can be found in the documentation as provided by the Met Office. The data is updated monthly.

Links to Further Information and references

The Met Office Hadley Centre for Climate Change observational datasets site - www.hadobs.org.

A recent paper about HadISST has been published in the Journal of Geophysical Research.

Also available is the GOSTAplus CD-ROM which contains some GISST, GICE, MOHSST6, MOHMATN4 data (to 1995) and maps. For more information about this CD-ROM, go to the GostaPlus BADC data Web page.

When using the data set in a paper, the following is the correct citation to use:

Rayner, N. A.; Parker, D. E.; Horton, E. B.; Folland, C. K.; Alexander, L. V.; Rowell, D. P.; Kent, E. C.; Kaplan, A. (2003) Global analyses of sea surface temperature, sea ice, and night marine air temperature since the late nineteenth century, J. Geophys. Res., Vol. 108, No. D14, 4407 10.1029/2002JD002670

Citation

Date of citation,

Who to Contact

If you have queries about these pages or about obtaining the Met Office HadISST data from the BADC then you should contact BADC Support. Your query should be answered within one working day. When follow-up work is required, the BADC support will carry out the work as quickly and efficiently as possible, and in any case, the user will be kept informed of progress.

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