Great Lakes Region & Data Description Tips Animate

The Great Lakes region is bounded by these coordinates: 49°N 41°N 76°W and 92°W.

For day passes, there are four image products produced. In the 'SeaDAS' stream, products include: a chlor_a (Chlorophyll a) image, an ergb (Enhanced RGB) image, a flh (Fluorescence Line Height) image, and a sst (Sea Surface Temperature) image. During night passes, two products are producted: a sst (Sea Surface Temperature) image and sst4 (Sea Surface Temperature) image.

Meris data is available for this area, however Envisat's end of mission was declared on May 8th, 2012 after communications with the satellite were lost on April 8th, 2012. Meris products include: a chlor_a (Chlorophyll a) image, an ergb (Enhanced RGB) image, a flh (Fluorescence Line Height) image, an experimental MCI image, and a normal rgb image.

You will notice that the most current imagery date is displayed. If there are several passes, they will be seen inside each of the tabs.

All images are mapped to a cylindrical equidistant projection. The Great Lakes area has a 1 kilometer resolution.

Where colorbars are available and applicable, if you click on a google earth icon, the colorbar will be shown inside Google Earth. For example, RGB and ERGB images have no associated color bar. When you click on a google earth icon, a kml file will be generated and sent for you to use in Google Earth.

HYCOM current data is also included in our kml files. Depending on the date of the image, different model experiments and runs have been used. The exact model and run is a clickable feature in the kml file. The HYCOM consortium is a multi-institutional effort sponsored by the National Ocean Partnership Program (NOPP), as part of the U. S. Global Ocean Data Assimilation Experiment (GODAE), to develop and evaluate a data-assimilative hybrid isopycnal-sigma-pressure (generalized) coordinate ocean model (called HYbrid Coordinate Ocean Model or HYCOM). The is default is to be visible in Google Earth, but the visiblity can be turned off by unchecking the Ocean Currents checkbox in the document.

NOTE: HYCOM is forecast data for the current date and should not be compared to real-time buoy data. HYCOM data is updated nightly and becomes the best available for imagery over 5 days old.

When a Google Earth link is clicked for a 'color' image (CI, CHL, RGB or ERGB depending on the area), in regions that contain Florida, or parts of Florida, Florida's FWC Karenia brevis data will be displayed as a layer. This will happen if you are viewing images from any week but the current week. Since FWC makes the data available on Friday, current week images do not have an association to K. brevis data until Saturday. The K. brevis data displayed corresponds to the date of the images you are viewing. All images during any one week are linked to that week's FWC K. brevis data. More information can be found at the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission's Red Tide Current Status page

Mouse over an image to see a larger thumbnail.

Click on the thumbnail image itself to open the highest resolution image in a new window or tab (depending on your browser). Some data is presented at 1 kilometer resolution (1KM), other data are presented at 250 meter resolution (QKM).

The tabs represent different passes on the same day. The default is to select the latest pass available, and the last pass on any given day.

Use the Calendar above the "Menu" to select the date you wish to see. You can use either the Month / Year drop down boxes or the arrows to the right and left of them to navigate by month.

Should you need to link directly to a specific page and tab, you can click on the 'Direct Link Here' under each image and copy the new address in the browser, or, more simply, right click and copy the link location.
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SST4: Sea Surface Temperature (in Degree C) estimated with the SeaDAS processing software (default product) using a multi-channel non-linear regression algorithm (Brown and Minnett, 1999). The difference from the "sst" image is that sst4 is derived from the 4-um channels instead of the 10-um channel, and therefore has higher sensitivity (image is sharper than sst). For most ocean waters RMS uncertainty is often within 0.5 degree, for coastal waters in the Gulf of Mexico RMS uncertainty is less than 1 degree (Hu et al., 2009). Most errors come from cloud contaminations. The MODIS standard product MOD35 (Ackerman et al., 2010) is used to discriminate clouds from water, and a cloudmask (grey color) is overlaid on the image.
SST: Sea Surface Temperature (in Degree C) estimated using the SeaDAS processing software (default product) with a multi-channel non-linear regression algorithm (Brown and Minnett, 1999). For most ocean waters RMS uncertainty is often within 0.5 degree, for coastal waters in the Gulf of Mexico RMS uncertainty is less than 1 degree (Hu et al., 2009). Most errors come from cloud contaminations. The MODIS standard product MOD35 (Ackerman et al., 2010) is used to discriminate clouds from water, and a cloudmask (grey color) is overlaid on the image.