Hi Julie,

With the rise of the GHRSST effort, it has been quite a while since I’ve looked at the original Pathfinder SST products. It does not surprise me that MGET is not able to access them anymore. We do not have an automated test for them, so I’m not sure when they stopped working. I’m sorry we’re not able to provide a more reliable set of tools for accessing them.

Anyway, I spent a few minutes looking into what has happened over the last 3-5 years with Pathfinder. It appears they released Pathfinder 5.3, which appears to be a complete reprocessing dating back to 1981 and similar in characteristics to Pathfinder 5.2, with some improvements. It is likely that the MGET tools for Pathfinder 5.2 can be adapted to work with 5.3 without too much work. Some code changes would be required, however. It appears that 5.3 is being actively updated; last update was earlier in 2021. Like 5.2, it appears that 5.3 is being released as a daily L3C product without any of the binnings (e.g. 8-day, monthly, yearly) that the 5.0/5.1 products had.

Looking back at 5.0/5.1, it appears that the main website you mentioned does not contain links to the 5.0/5.1 data anymore. However, it does appear that NCEI is still hosting the data (e.g. here). I do not know what their terms of service are, etc., but in principle, the existing MGET code for 5.0/5.1 could be restored to working by changing its base URLs to point to that new distribution location.

I’m not sure the Pathfinder developers would recommend using 5.0/5.1 over their newer products, but if you like, I could check whether the 5.0/5.1 tool could be fixed by pointing it the new site. Alternatively, I could check whether the 5.2 tool would work by 5.3 with some minimal changes. I should eventually do these things anyway, so that MGET is not broken, or remove the tools from MGET. It is mainly a question of timing, and I have very little time to work on this right now. But I could try to get one of them working if it was critical to you. Let me know what your needs are and I’ll think over what is possible.

Best,

Jason

Hi Jason—

Many thanks for your helpful tip from 4/2-4/8 to update the NASA PO.DAAC cacerts.txt file.  That fix also worked for me!   I have also upgraded to v0.8a75 (using ArcMap 10.7.1).

I’m hoping this is a similar issue.  I need some old sst data (1999-2002) and am trying to create rasters using the Create Rasters for AVHRR Pathfinder V5 SST.  I get the errors in the screen grabs below. On the AVHRR website, it looks like V5 has possibly been removed?  Only metadata is available.  The tool to Create Rasters for AVHRR Pathfinder V5.2 SST also does not work, with the same errors. 

I’m using V5 because MGET allows for the choice of an 8-day temporal scale with V5.  I’m happy to use whatever version works or other data if it is more appropriate.

Thank you for any help you can provide. 

--Julie

Julie Howar, Coastal Program Biologist/GIS Specialist

Point Blue Conservation Science

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