A-HIGHERS-The system to produce the high spatial resolution sea surface temperature maps of the Western North Pacific using the AVHRR/NOAA

To study on the oceanic variations in the western North Pacific, we developed a system to produce a high spatial resolution sea surface temperature (SST) map from the data obtained by the Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer (AVHRR) aboard the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) satellites. As the system has been improved on the HIGHERS (Sakaida and Kawamura, 1996), it is called the Advanced-HIGHERS (A-HIGHERS). The A-HIGHERS has been developed on the super computer in the Tohoku University, which is favorable for handling of a large volume of data. Mainly because of improvements in the cloud detection algorithm, the A-HIGHERS can deal with the data obtained at dawn and dusk around the year, and at daytime in summer more effectively. The A-HIGHERS are used to produce SST maps spanning from (60°N, 120°E) to (20°N, 160°E) with a grid size of 0.01 degree.