Record Details
Comparisons of Daily Sea Surface Temperature Analyses for 2007–08
ScholarsArchive at Oregon State University
| Field | Value |
|---|---|
| Title | Comparisons of Daily Sea Surface Temperature Analyses for 2007–08 |
| Names |
Reynolds, Richard W.
(creator) Chelton, Dudley B. (creator) |
| Date Issued | 2010-07 (iso8601) |
| Abstract | Six different SST analyses are compared with each other and with buoy data for the period 2007–08. All analyses used different combinations of satellite data [for example, infrared Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer (AVHRR) and microwave Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer (AMSR) instruments] with different algorithms, spatial resolution, etc. The analyses considered are the National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) AVHRR-only and AMSR+AVHRR, the Navy Coupled Ocean Data Assimilation (NCODA), the Remote Sensing Systems (RSS), the Real-Time Global High-Resolution (RTG-HR), and the Operational SST and Sea Ice Analysis (OSTIA); the spatial grid sizes were 1/4°, 1/4°, 1/9°, 1/11°, 1/12°, and 1/20°, respectively. In addition, all analyses except RSS used in situ data. Most analysis procedures and weighting functions differed. Thus, differences among analyses could be large in high-gradient and data-sparse regions. An example off the coast of South Carolina showed winter SST differences that exceeded 5°C. To help quantify SST analysis differences, wavenumber spectra were computed at several locations. These results suggested that the RSS is much noisier and that the RTG-HR analysis is much smoother than the other analyses. Further comparisons made using collocated buoys showed that RSS was especially noisy in the tropics and that RTG-HR had winter biases near the Aleutians region during January and February 2007. The correlation results show that NCODA and, to a somewhat lesser extent, OSTIA are strongly tuned locally to buoy data. The results also show that grid spacing does not always correlate with analysis resolution. The AVHRR-only analysis is useful for climate studies because it is the only daily SST analysis that extends back to September 1981. Furthermore, comparisons of the AVHRR-only analysis and the AMSR+AVHRR analysis show that AMSR data can degrade the combined AMSR and AVHRR resolution in cloud-free regions while AMSR otherwise improves the resolution. These results indicate that changes in satellite instruments over time can impact SST analysis resolution. |
| Genre | Article |
| Topic | Sea surface temperature |
| Identifier | Reynolds, Richard W., Dudley B. Chelton, 2010: Comparisons of Daily Sea Surface Temperature Analyses for 2007–08. Journal of Climate, 23, 3545–3562. |
