Rationale for the Creation of a High Resolution Satellite Sea Surface Temperature (SST) dataset Leveraging Overlapping Swaths; a Simple Analysis to Ground Truth the Method

Advances in the modeling and engineering sciences promise to bridge the two communities of atmospheric science and ocean science with a variety of programming and technological improvements: For example, the Estimating the Climate and Circulation of the Ocean model (ECCO 2) assimilates ocean data at a grid resolution of 18 km (within the scope of mesoscale ocean and air-sea dynamics); improvements such as the coupled GEOS-ECCO, with 4 km gridding in the ocean and 7 km in the atmosphere, promises even better climate simulation in the future. Advances in retrieval of surface data have also made great strides. The proposed ODYSEA mission promises to retrieve winds and currents at mesoscale and sub mesoscale resolution. The surface water ocean topography mission (SWOT; highly related to SST) which was slated to have a resolution of ~15 km yet has even better resolution with sub-kilometer scale features.The Multi-scale Ultra-high Resolution (MUR) Sea Surface Temperature (SST) has 1 km gridding, but has the inability represent this finely gridded data on cloudy days.

However, finely gridded earth system models will require equally finely gridded SST data for assimilation. This presentation proposes the use of a simple MATLAB surface advection algorithm to ground truth the idea that existing microwave SST satellite missions (free of clouds), such as Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission Microwave Imager, Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer for the Earth Observing System, Special Sensor Microwave Imager, and Special Sensor Microwave Imager (with gridding on the order of 25 km), and may be leveraged to create higher resolution datasets, with gridding more finely constrained by the overlapping swaths of existing microwave SST satellite missions. The goal of this poster is to enhance discussions towards the formation of community organized observing system simulation experiments (OSSEs) with the objective of creating a NASA mission fleet of Cubesats specifically geared towards microwave SST, similar to the SuperDove surface imaging mission.