ANALYSIS OF SEA SURFACE TEMPERATURE USING IN SITU AND INFRARED MEASUREMENTS FROM GEOSTATIONARY SATELLITES

I. V. Getmanchuk and A. S. Alistratova

A technique is proposed for numerical analysis of sea surface temperature (SST) based on variational adjustment of ship data and IR measurements from geostationary satellite Meteosat. Numerical experiments were carried out for a fragment of the Atlantic Ocean for August 1997. It was shown that SST obtained from satellite data alone and by variational analysis is lower than SST obtained from in situ measurements. The satellite-derived SST fields have higher horizontal gradients than SST fields from the ship data. The results of the variational analysis of SST from satellite and in situ SST measurements demonstrated that the joint use of satellite and in situ SST measurements does not improve estimation accuracy, although temperature gradients increase.