Improving Satellite-Derived Sea Surface Temperature Accuracies Using Water Vapor Profile Data

Abstract

Analyses based on atmospheric infrared radiative transfer simulations and collocated ship and satellite data are used to investigate whether knowledge of vertical atmospheric water vapor distributions can improve the accuracy of sea surface temperature (SST) estimates from satellite data. Initially, a simulated set of satellite brightness temperatures generated by a radiative transfer model with a large maritime radiosonde database was obtained. Simple linear SST algorithms are derived from this dataset, and these are then reapplied to the data to give simulated SST estimates and errors. The concept of water vapor weights is introduced in which a weight is a measure of the layer contribution to the difference between the surface temperature and that measured by the satellite. The weight of each atmospheric layer is defined as the layer water vapor amount multiplied by the difference between the SST and the midlayer temperature. Satellite-derived SST errors are then plotted against the difference in the sum of weights above an altitude of 2.5 km and that below. For the simple two-channel (with typical wavelengths of 11 and 12 ?m) analysis, a clear correlation between the weights differences and the SST errors is found. A second group of analyses using ship-released radiosondes and satellite data also show a correlation between the SST errors and the weights differences. The analyses suggest that, for an SST derived using a simple two-channel algorithm, the accuracy may be improved if account is taken of the vertical distribution of water vapor above the ocean surface. For SST estimates derived using algorithms that include data from a 3.7-?m channel, there is no such correlation found.