Optimizing SST for sea turtles
[This post will be updated frequently. If you are interested in the topic please check back and post your comments below.]
Quite a few years ago now, when I was first setting up STAT and Maptool, I recall being unhappy with the publicly available sea surface temperature (SST) data sets at the time. This was probably some time during 2003.
I was able to get access to GOES SST, which was not publicly accessible at the time. This was an excellent data set for the time, with daily 6km resolution SST images. Unfortunately it was not a global data set, only covering parts of the Atlantic and Pacific (mainly areas of US interest). In any case, I included these data in STAT and Maptool because the quality was relatively good.
All of the global SST data sets that I could find at the time either had too many gaps (eg clouds or lack of satellite coverage) or too much smoothing (eg over-interpolating to fill in the gaps), such that the small scale variations in areas such as the Gulf Stream or the Kuroshio Current would be lost.