Hi Kim,

The tool allows you to specify a start date and end date. If all of your sightings are clustered in a specific season, you focus the tool on that range of dates. But it sounds like you have already explored that and it won’t work because your 55 days are scattered across four years, making it hard to pick a single range of dates that encompasses all 55 without getting the entire four years.

I have a few suggestions:

1.    Yes, you can call the tool from Python within a loop, passing in values for the start date and end date parameters. If you’re experienced with Python then this could be the easiest solution. If you go this route, you should not access the MGET toolbox from the arcpy geoprocessor. MGET is such a large toolbox (the largest outside ESRI, they have told me) that arcpy has trouble loading it all into memory. Instead you should create the geoprocessor with arcgisscripting.create(). Let me know if you need help with that.

2.    You can probably accomplish a similar thing from the ModelBuilder GUI. Create a new model. Drag the MGET tool into it. Set all of the parameters the way you want except for Start date and End date. Now right click on the tool in the model, select Make Variable à From Parameter à Start date. Do the same with End date. Now right click Start date and select Properties. Change “This variable contains” to “A list of values” and click ok. Do the same with End date. Now double click on the Start date oval and put in your values. You may be able to paste from Excel or some other list. Try right clicking in the cell and exploring the options, such as Insert values from a table. Set the End date values to the same as the Start date values. This should download one day.

3.    If you’re on a fast network, it might not be all that bad to download four years of rasters. If you reduce your spatial extent to your study area, the download will be for just that region, rather than globally. This can greatly speed up download of multiple rasters.

4.    If you need to extract values of SST for points that have a date field, use the Interpolate AVHRR Pathfinder V5.2 SST at Points tool. This will be much easier than downloading rasters, matching your points to the appropriate raster, and doing the extraction.

I hope that helps.

Jason