Abstract
The first full-mission global AVHRR FRAC sea surface temperature (SST) dataset with a nominal 1.1 km resolution at nadir was produced from three Metop First Generation (FG) satellites: Metop-A (2006-on), -B (2012-on) and -C (2018-on), using the NOAA Advanced Clear Sky Processor for Ocean (ACSPO) SST enterprise system. Historical reprocessing (‘Reanalysis-1’, RAN1) starts at the beginning of each mission and continues into near-real time (NRT). ACSPO generates two SST products, one with global regression (GR; highly sensitive to skin SST), and another one with piecewise regression (PWR; proxy for depth SST) algorithms. Small residual effects of orbital and sensor instabilities on SST retrievals are mitigated by retraining the regression coefficients daily, using matchups with drifting and tropical moored buoys within moving time windows. In RAN, the training windows are centered at the processed day. In NRT, the same size windows are employed but delayed in time, ending four to ten days prior to the processed day. Delayed-mode RAN reprocessing follows the NRT with a two-month lag, resulting in a higher quality and a more consistent SST record. In addition to its completeness, the newly created Metop-FG RAN1 SST dataset shows very close agreement with in situ data (including the fully independent Argo floats), well within the NOAA specifications for accuracy (global mean bias; ±0.2 K) and precision (global standard deviation; 0.6 K) in a ~20% clear-sky domain (percent of clear-sky SST pixels to the total of ice-free ocean). All performance statistics are stable in time, and consistent across the three platforms. The Metop-FG RAN1 data set is archived at the NASA JPL PO.DAAC and NOAA NCEI. This paper documents the newly created dataset and evaluates its performance.
Highlights
Advanced Clear Sky Processor for Ocean (ACSPO) is the NOAA enterprise sea surface temperature (SST) system
For Metops, such uncorrelated variations in their O’s are much smaller than they were in the NOAA GAC data
Oftentimes, if clouds are present in the scene, the current ACSPO Clear-Sky Mask (ACSM) typically
Summary
Advanced Clear Sky Processor for Ocean (ACSPO) is the NOAA enterprise sea surface temperature (SST) system. Delayed-mode RAN reprocessing follows the NRT with a two-month lag, resulting in a higher quality and a more consistent SST record. Note that prior to the AVHRR FRAC RAN1, the only Metop-FG SST data which existed were two OSISAF NRT datasets produced by EUMETSAT and available from PO.DAAC (AVHRR_SST_METOP_A-OSISAF-L2P-v1.0 from 4 June 2013–23 November 2016 [20], and AVHRR_SST_METOP_B-OSISAF-L2P-v1.0 from 19 January 2016–present [21]). The in situ SSTs from drifting and tropical moored buoys (D + TM) and Argo floats (AF), employed in the calibration and validation (Cal/Val) of satellite data, come from another NOAA system, in situ SST Quality Monitor (iQuam, [24,25]). Quality of the ACSPO Clear-Sky Mask (ACSM) and SST imagery, as well as the newly derived thermal fronts product, are monitored in the NOAA ACSPO Regional. Monitor for SST system (ARMS [27])
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