This is a mosaic made up of true colour images acquired during March 2003 using three out of 15 MERIS spectral bands taken from Envisat in polar orbit at an altitude of 800 km, with data combined from around 500 separate orbital segments with the intention of minimising cloud cover as much as possible. The image has a 1.2 km resolution and is made up of 40,000 by 20,000 pixels, equal to 2.5 gigabytes of output data.