Bulk-skin temperature difference over the tropical Pacific

Abstract

Sea surface temperatures (SSTs) are necessary for the computation of fluxes of the sensible and latent heat and upward longwave radiation at the air-sea interface. The term SST has usually referred to the sea surface bulk temperature measured by ships or buoys at a depth of a few centimeters to a few meters, rather than the sea surface skin (or radiometric) temperature. Various approaches have been developed in the past several decades to understand the difference between bulk and skin temperatures. However, these methods require the net surface heat flux and near-surface wind speed. This paper develops an algorithm for the computation of skin temperature that uses bulk temperature and wind speed alone, which is then used to produce a multi-year hourly skin temperature dataset using bulk temperature and wind speed data over the tropical Pacific Ocean from the TOGA Tropical Atmosphere-Ocean (TAO) moored buoys.