SST Analysis in GEOS GCM

An analysed Sea Surface Temperature (SST) will provide improved estimates of surface fluxes in order to better predict short timescale weather features such as tropical cyclones and also yield balanced- initial conditions for longer climate predictions. In this talk we present improvements to skin SST modeling in the GEOS AGCM, which includes modeling of a cool-skin layer and diurnal warming layer. Preliminary results from assimilation of brightness temperature (BT) using the Gridpoint Statistical Interpolation (GSI)- highlighting the observation-minus-forecast obtained using AVHRR BT will be discussed as well.