IMaRS Home Online Imagery: Sea Surface Temperature - Daily Sea Surface Temperature - Composite Sea Surface Temperature - Animations SeaWiFS - Composite MODIS SST Composite Data Sites: Caribbean Caribbean - SE Florida - SE Florida - West Shelf Gulf of Mexico United States East Coast Cuba Related Links Contact Us

Current Imagery Caribbean Basin Caribbean Basin SE Florida East Shelf Florida West Shelf Gulf Of Mexico United States East Coast Cuba The images that are in these directories are three day composite images. The date on the image is the middle day of the three days. A composite is different than an average as it is used to reduce cloud coverage. This means that if there is cloud coverage on one or more of the data points, this value is not used to compute the average. These composites are made with both day and night satellite pass imagery. Sea Surface Temperature (SST) was derived from infrared (IR) observations collected by the Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer (AVHRR) sensors flown on the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) Polar Orbiting Environmental Satellite (POES) series. Data are collected using the High Resolution Picture Transmission (HRPT) antenna located at the University of South Florida, in St. Petersburg, FL., and the archive holdings are available through today. All passes from all NOAA AVHRR satellite passes collected since September 1993 are available, including all nighttime and daytime passes starting with the AVHRR on the NOAA 11 satellite. SST was computed using the multi-channel sea-surface temperature (MCSST) algorithm developed by McClain et al. (1985; see also McClain et al., 1983; Strong and McClain, 1984; Walton, 1988; Wick et al., 1992). The approximate root mean square (rms) error of the AVHRR SST retrievals, confirmed by our lab through comparisons with in situ data, is of the order of 0.5 degrees C (see also Brown, 1985; Minnett, 1991). All SST fields are mapped to a Cylindrical Equidistant projection, according to the coordinates shown in Table 1 below. Note however, that radiometers sense radiation emitted from the upper few micrometers of the ocean only (Grassl, 1976). This "skin" is the top of the millimeter-thin molecular boundary layer that transports heat from a turbulent ocean below to a turbulent atmosphere above (Wick et al., 1992). There can be considerable differences between the skin temperature and the bulk temperature of sea water (Schluessel et al, 1987; Schluessel et al, 1990), and mass flux by evaporation and radiative cooling, i.e. processes that act strongly on daily and seasonal scales, lead to considerable differences (Maul, 1985, page 186). This effect therefore may mask variability in the depth dimension. Table 1 Tag Latitude Longitude Spatial Resolution Pixel Dimensions Area Description carib 8N-24N 89W-58W 3.5x6.7km (512x512) Caribbean oup 8N-15N 67W-58W 1.5x2.0km (512x512) Caribbean - SE efl 24N-31N 82W- 76W 1.5x1.3km (512x512) East Florida Shelf wfl 24N-30.5N 87.5W-80.5W 1.4x1.5km (512x512) West Florida Shelf gulf 18N-31N 98W-79W 2.8x4.1km (512x512) Gulf of Mexico east 23N-45N 82W- 68W 4.8x3.0km (512x512) US - East Coast cuba 19.2-24.7 87.2W-73.0W 1.0x1.0km (1576x610) Cuba References: Brown, O. B., J. W. Brown, and R. H. Evans. 1985. Calibration of advanced very high resolution radiometer infrared observations. J. Geophysical Research. 90. 11667-11678. Grassl, H. 1976. The dependence of the measured cool skin of the ocean on wind stress and total heat flux. Boundary Layer Met. 10. 465-474. Maul, G. A. 1985. Introduction to satellite oceanography. Martinus Nijhoff Publishers. 606 p. McClain, E. P., W. G. Pichel, C. C. Walton, Z. Ahmad, and J. Sutton, Multi-channel improvements to satellite-derived global sea-surface temperatures, Adv. Space Res, 2(6), 43-47, 1983. Minnett, P. J. 1991. Consequences of sea surface temperature variability on the validation and applications of satellite measurements. Journal of Geophysical Research. 96(C10). 18,475-18,489. Schluessel, P., H.-Y. Shin, W. J. Emery, and H. Grassl. 1987. Comparison of satellite-derived sea-surface temperatures with in situ skin measurements. J. Geophysical Research. 92(C3). 2859-2874. Schluessel, P., W. J. Emery, H. Grassl, and T. Mammen. 1990. On the bulk-skin temperature difference and its impact on satellite remote sensing of sea surface temperature. J. Geophysical Research. 95(C8). 13341-13356. Strong, A. E. and E. P. McClain, Improved ocean surface temperatures from space, Comparisons with drifting buoys, Bull. Am. Meteor. Soc., 65(2), 138-142, 1984. Walton, C. C., Nonlinear multichannel algorithms for estimating sea surface temperature with AVHRR satellite data, Journal of Applied Meteorology, 27, 115-27, 1988. Wick, G. A., W. J. Emery, and P. Schluessel. 1992. A comprehensive comparison between satellite-measured skin and multichannel sea surface temperature. Journal of Geophysical Research. 97(C4). 5569-5595.

University of South Florida > College of Marine Science > Institute for Marine Remote Sensing (IMaRS) > Sea Surface Temperature - Composite University of South Florida, College of Marine Science, Institute for Marine Remote Sensing (IMaRS) http://imars.marine.usf.edu/sst/index_rm.html Address questions and comments to Webmaster Updated Thu Oct 4 09:59:14 EDT 2001 (BJM)