NOAA's operational geostatinary and blended sea surface temperature products

NOAA's National Environmental Satellite, Data, and Information Service (NESDIS) have generated Sea Surface Temperature (SST) products from Geostationary (GOES) East (E) and West (W) satellites on an operational basis since December of 2000. Since that time, a process of continual development has produced steady improvements in product accuracy. Recent improvements extended the capability to permit generation of operational SST retrievals from the Japanese Multi-function Transport Satellite (MTSAT)-2 and the European Meteosat Second Generation (MSG)-2 satellite, thereby extending spatial coverage. The four geostationary satellites (longitudes 75°W, 135°W, 140°E, and 0°, respectively) provide high temporal SST retrievals for most of the tropics and mid-latitudes, with the exception of a region between ~60°E and ~80°E. Due to ongoing development, the quality of these retrievals now approaches that of SST products from the polar orbiting Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer (AVHRR). The suite of products consists of gridded, NetCDF imagery and HDF blended SST analysis. Gridded products generated from the four geostationary satellites provide hourly regional imagery, 3-hourly hemispheric imagery, and 24 hour merged composites, along with a buoy matchup data set. NetCDF Level 2 preprocessed products are generated for every satellite image. This consists of a pixel level SST and additional parameters which are generated for GOES-E/W every 30 minutes for each N and S hemispheric sectors; MTSAT-2 every 60 minutes for each full disk sector; and MSG-2 every 15 minutes for each full disk sector. The blended SST is a daily 0.1°×0.1° resolution analysis generated from blending geostationary and polar-orbiting satellite SST retrievals. These products provide to the user community a reliable source of SST observations, with improved accuracy and increased coverage in important oceanographic, meteorological, and climatic regions.

A dynamic estimate of the SST field using a recursive estimation algorithm which emulates the Kalman filter (Khellah et al., 2005) is applied to the NOAA operational polar-orbiting and geostationary SST data sets to generate the 0.1°×0.1° daily global SST analysis and a 0.05°×0.05° regional analysis. Uncertainty estimates for each observation type (day and night separately) are also generated. The SST inputs to the current analysis are GOES-11, 13, MTSAT-2, MSG-2, NOAA-19 and MetOp-A. In the future, the analyses will include microwave SST data (AMSR-E, AMSR-2); other polar orbiting data (e.g. AATSR SST); and diurnal warming estimates.

These analyses meets the needs of the user community for 1) resolving mesoscale oceanographic features (e.g. fronts and eddies); improving ocean forecasting, providing an important tool for the coral reef Watch, and Ocean Watch / Coast Watch for coastal and fisheries management.