Grand Composite Raster Images of Turbidity in the Gulf of Maine for Stellwagen Bank NMS

These raster images are a composite of several years (1997-2005) binned by season or by month, and were calculated as means or as medians.For those images binned by month, all of the months for the time series were averaged together to make one mean image. For example, Jan '98, Jan '99, Jan 00, Jan 01, Jan 02, Jan 03, Jan 04 = Grand Monthly Mean for January.For those images binned by season, the seasons were defined as the following: 1) Fall= September, October, November; 2) Winter= December, January, February; 3) Spring= March, April, May; 4) Summer= June, July, August.

All chlorophyll geotifs binned by year and season were then averaged again to create a grand mean for each season. For example, spring '98, spring '99, spring 00, spring 01, spring 02, spring 03, spring 04 = Grand Seasonal Mean for Spring.These images were also reprocessed to remove land and no data values (value = 252 and value = 0, 253, 251 respectively), as well as to calculate the real world values for turbidty in inverse steradians.