The processes and scripts used to convert the AVHRR data to SST shapefile and text data are described in Payne and others (2011). An important difference distinguishing the Arctic data from the Northern Pacific data of the previous report is that no buffer was implemented to constrain the Arctic data to the nearshore region. Furthermore, the Python scripts provided here have been modified from the original scripts used to derive the geospatial data in order to integrate the ArcGIS 10 "arcpy" module for compatibility with ArcGIS 10 and Python v. 2.6.

Arctic raster, shapefile, and text (.csv) data are available for download from the "downloads" page of this website (click "downloads" on the left-side menu). Each point in an Arctic point shapefile was created by extracting the temperature value from the centroid of a corresponding grid cell in the Arctic raster dataset. Because the data volumes are very large, the text (.csv) files are further divided into individual ecoregions, resulting in one .csv file per month per year per ecoregion for Arctic SST data. This data partition scheme was necessary to accommodate memory constraints experienced during processing (text files were generated with R (R Development Team, 2009)). These divisions were not necessary for the shapefile and raster data.