Aircraft validation of ERS-1 ATSR and NOAA-14 AVHRR sea surface temperature measurements

Abstract

Infrared brightness temperature (BT) measurements obtained from the UK Meteorological Research Flight C-130 Hercules aircraft, spatially coincident and near contemporaneous with ERS-1 Along Track Scanning Radiometer (ATSR) and NOAA-14 Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer (AVHRR), are presented. These data have been used to obtain much needed on-going validation of the ERS-1 ATSR prior to the de-commissioning of the ATSR instrument in March 1997. BT comparisons between the ATSR and AVHRR nadir channels show negligible differences of 0.3 deg K, indicating that both radiometers are well calibrated. However, significant differences are found when common sea surface temperature (SST) algorithms are applied to the BT data. The original dual view ERS-1 ATSR skin SST (SSST) algorithm has a 0.6K cool bias relative to the in situ observations, which is consistent with other in situ validation studies. New SSST coefficients derived using the same atmospheric transmission model show that, when the appropriate pixel noise contribution is considered in the algorithm derivation, substantially improved SSST is derived from the ERS-1 ATSR. Comparing the NOAA-14 AVHRR non-linear SST (NLSST) and multi-channel SST (MCSST) algorithms to the aircraft data, the non-linear nature of the NLSST algorithm results in a small bias of 0.3 deg K compared to a substantial cool bias of 1 deg K in the MCSST case. This result highlights deficiencies in the MCSST.