NOAA OISST v2 High Resolution daily sea surface temperatures with R
Update, 2015-11-30 It appears that NOAA has gone through and upgraded all of the OISST files to the newer version of the NetCDF file format. As a result, the functions outlined in this post don’t work any longer. Instead, see the updated functions in my newer post, https://lukemiller.org/index.php/2014/11/extracting-noaa-sea-surface-temperatures-with-ncdf4/. The concepts are the same as described here, but the newer functions use the ncdf4 package to access the newer NetCDF file format.
The National Ocean and Atmospheric Administration generates freely-available world-wide estimates of mean daily sea surface temperature, and has been doing so back to 1981. The data are on … Continue Reading