A technique for creating composite sea surface temperatures from NASA's MODIS instruments in order to improve numerical weather prediction

The presenters will describe, and show results from, a technique for creating gridded composites of sea surface temperature (SST) from the MODIS instruments onboard the Aqua and Terra satellites. Several features of the technique make it well suited to mesoscale numerical weather prediction. First, it is real-time and can be made global. Second, the temporal component of the technique can be adjusted to maximize autocorrelation in the data and minimize missing data where cloudiness and other circumstances make good retrievals impossible. Third, holes in the composite owing to any remaining missing data are filled with a background field. Fourth, the diurnal variation of SST is taken into account.