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ISLSCP II Sea Surface Temperature                     


File Name Convention
--------------------

The following files are included:

sst_climate_1d_1971-2000-MM.asc: 12 files with the gridded monthly climatology 
of SST in degrees C averaged over any particular month during the period 1971-
2000. 1d means that this data set is at a 1-degree spatial resolution in both 
latitude and longitude. MM is the month from 01 to 12.

sst_oiv2_1d_YYYYMM00.asc: 120 files with the gridded monthly SST fields in 
degrees C. YYYY is the year from 1986 to 1995 and MM is the month from 01 to 12. 
The 00 means this is a monthly average. 

sst_oiv2_1d_YYYYMMDD.asc: 522 files with the gridded weekly SST fields in 
degrees C. YYYY is the year from 1986 to 1995 and MM is the month from 01 to 12. 
DD is the day for the middle of the weekly period. NOTE: For the 1980's the 
weeks are centered on Sunday (i.e. Thursday to Wednesday) and from the 1990's 
onward the weeks are centered on Wednesday (i.e. Sunday to Saturday). This small 
change leads to a three-day overlap in the weekly SST files for the last week of 
1989 and the first week of 1990.

sst_oiv2_error_1d_YYYYMMDD.asc: Same as above but for gridded weekly normalized 
error variance fields (unitless).

sst_oiv2_1d_changemap.asc: a gridded ASCII file with values showing the differences
between the ISLSCP II land/water mask and the original data set. All points with
negative values (-1) are those where the ISLSCP II mask showed water but where the
original data set showed land and this point was removed. All points with a value
of zero are those points where the two land/water masks agreed.

mask_diffs_1d.asc: a gridded ASCII file with values describing the differences 
between the the ISLSCP II land/water mask and the original land mask. The values
are either 0, 1, or 2 where  0 = both ISLSCP II land/water mask and original mask
agree that cell is either water or land, 1 = ISLSCP II mask is water and original
mask is land, and  2 = ISLSCP II mask is land and original mask is water.

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ASCII Data Format
-----------------

All of the files in the ISLSCP Initiative II data collection are in the ASCII, 
or text format. The file format consists of numerical fields of varying length, 
which are delimited by a single space and arranged in columns and rows. All 
files in this data set contain 360 columns (pixels) and 180 rows (lines). All 
values are written as real numbers. Land cells are assigned the value of -888.80 
on all data layers. Missing data over inland water bodies in the monthly 
climatology files are assigned the value of -999.90

All files are gridded to a common equal-angle lat/long grid, where the 
coordinates of the upper left corner of the files are located at 180 
degrees W, 90 degrees N and the lower right corner coordinates are located 
at 180 degrees E, 90 degrees S. Data in the files are ordered from North 
to South and from West to East beginning at 180 degrees West and 90 
degrees North.