Geostationary Sea Surface Temperature Products (Current and Future)

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Office of Satellite Data Processing and Distribution are generating operational sea surface temperature (SST) retrievals from GOES-9/10 and 12 satellite imagers. They are situated at longitude 154.5 E, 135 W and 75 W respectively, thus allowing the acquisition of high temporal SST retrievals from 110 E to 330 E (i.e. 30 W). Combined with data from the European Meteosat Second Generation (MSG) series of satellites, Japanese MTSAT-1R and the Chinese FY2C, we can now determine the diurnal cycle of SST throughout most of the world's oceans. This is an important capability for the generation of a new global high resolution SST analysis that combines polar and geostationary observations.

A new cloud masking methodology based on a probabilistic (Bayesian) approach has been implemented for improved retrieval accuracy. This new GOES SST Bayesian algorithm estimates probability of cloud contamination for each SST retrieval, thus indicating the confidence level of the cloud detection which can, in turn, be related to retrieval accuracy.

The GOES-SST products generated from these algorithms include hourly regional sectors and 3-hourly hemispheric imagery, 24 hour merged composites and the new combined POES/GOES 10-km resolution SST analysis. Other GOES-SST related activities that are ongoing include the reprocessing of GVAR data back to 1994 (i.e. GOES-8) and Risk Reduction studies for the upcoming GOES-R program.