High-Resolution Seamless Daily Sea Surface Temperature Based on Satellite Data Fusion and Machine Learning over Kuroshio Extension

Abstract

Sea SurfaceTemperature (SST) is a critical parameter for monitoring the marine environment and understanding various ocean phenomena. While SST can be regularly retrieved from satellite data, it often suffers from missing data due to various reasons including cloud contamination. In this study, we proposed a novel two-step data fusion framework for generating high-resolution seamless daily SST from multi-satellite data sources. The proposed approach consists of (1) SST reconstruction based on Data Interpolate Convolutional AutoEncoder (DINCAE) using the SSTs derived from two satellite sensors (i.e., Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) and Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer 2(AMSR2)), and (2) SST improvement through data fusion using random forest for consistency with in situ measurements with two schemes (i.e., scheme 1 using the reconstructed MODIS SST variables and scheme 2 using both MODIS and AMSR2 SST variables). The proposed approach was evaluated over the Kuroshio Extension in the Northwest Pacific, where a highly dynamic SST pattern can be found, from 2015 to 2019. The results showed that the reconstructed MODIS and AMSR2 SSTs through DINCAE yielded very good performance with Root Mean Square Errors (RMSEs) of 0.85 and 0.60 °C and Mean Absolute Errors (MAEs) of 0.59 and 0.45 °C, respectively. The results from the second step showed that scheme 2 and scheme 1 produced RMSEs of 0.75 and 0.98 °C and MAEs of 0.53 and 0.68 °C, respectively, compared to the in situ measurements, which proved the superiority of scheme 2 using multi-satellite data sources. Scheme 2 also showed comparable or even better performance than two operational SST products with similar spatial resolution. In particular, scheme 2 was good at simulating features with fine resolution (~50 km). The proposed approach yielded promising results over the study area, producing seamless daily SST products with high quality and high feature resolution.