About the Tool and Data

My World is a Geographic Information System (GIS) designed specifically to meet the needs of students and teachers in middle school through college geo-science and geography classrooms. My World provides most of the powerful features of a professional GIS environment. These features include customizable display of layer variables, multiple geographic projections, table and map views of data, distance-measurement tools, buffering and query operations. They have been selected to provide the greatest power to students without overwhelming them with complexity. The features are accessed through a supportive interface designed with the needs of students and teachers in mind.

Geographic Data in Education (GEODE) Initiative, Northwestern University

A free time-limited trial version of My World GIS is available from the GEODE Initiative at Northwestern University. For longer-term or repeated use, a $99 classroom or a $399 school or university site license is available from Pasco Scientific.

http://MyWorldGIS.org/myworld/

This SST analysis is a product of the Environmental Modeling Center Climate Modeling Branch of the National Centers for Environmental Prediction. The data are provided in NetCDF format by the Climate Diagnostics Center.

The optimum interpolation (OI) sea surface temperature (SST) analysis is produced weekly on a one-degree grid. The analysis uses in situ and satellite SST's plus SST's simulated by sea-ice cover. Before the analysis is computed, the satellite data is adjusted for biases using the method of Reynolds (1988) and Reynolds and Marsico (1993). A description of the OI analysis can be found in Reynolds and Smith (1994).

The bias correction improves the large scale accuracy of the OI. Examples of the effect of recent corrections is given by Reynolds (1993). The bias correction does add a small amount of noise in time. Most of the noise can be eliminated by using a 1/4-1/2-1/4 binomial filter in time. We STRONGLY recommend that this filter be applied to the data fields before they are used. An improved method of correcting the biases is being developed.

For a complete description of the data as given by the providers and references for the papers cited in the description please see their information file Provider information for the Reynolds SST datasets

Reynolds, R. W. and T. M. Smith, 1994: Improved global sea surface temperature analyses using optimum interpolation. J. Climate, 7, 929-948.