Tropical Pacific Sea Surface Temperature (SST) Anomalies


These data represent gridded monthly SST anomalies for 399 consecutive months from January 1970 through March 2003. The data were obtained from the IRI/LDEO Climate Data Library at Columbia University (http://iridl.ldeo.columbia.edu/).  The data are gridded at a 2 degree by 2 degree resolution and represent anomalies from a January 1970 - December 1985 monthly (average) climatology. A more complete description can be found at
http://iridl.ldeo.columbia.edu/SOURCES/.CAC/. 

In addition to Chapter 5 and 9 of Cressie and Wikle (2011), these data have been analyzed and modeled in the following papers:

L.M. Berliner, C.K. Wikle, and N. Cressie. Long-lead prediction of Pacific SSTs via Bayesian dynamic modeling. Journal of Climate, 13:3953-3968, 2000.

C.K. Wikle and M.B. Hooten. A general science-based framework for dynamical spatio-temporal models (with discussion). Test, 19:417-468, 2010.

C.K. Wikle and S.H. Holan. Polynomial nonlinear spatio-temporal integro-difference equation models. Journal of Time Series Analysis, DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9892.2011.00729.x, 2011.

FILES:


SST011970_032003.dat: 2520 x 399 matrix; 2520 spatial locations corresponding to an 84 (longitude) by 30 (latitude) grid with 2 deg x 2 deg spacing. The longitudes correspond to 124 E to 70W and the latitudes to 29S to 29N. There are 399 time periods representing sequentially the months from January 1970 through March 2003.

SSTlonlat.dat: 2520 x 2 matrix; longitude in first column and latitude in the second, corresponding to the spatial grid locations in SST011970_032003.dat; note: the longitudes are given from 124 to 290 by 2, corresponding to 124E to 290E (where 290E corresponds to 70W).

SSTlandmask.dat: 2520 x 1 vector; land/sea mask corresponding to the grid locations in SSTlonlat.dat, with a value of 1 corresponding to a "land" location and a 0 corresponding to a water location.