Near‐surface ocean temperature

Abstract

The first open ocean deployment of the Skin Depth Experimental Profiler (SkinDeEP) was from the R/V Melville in the Gulf of California during the Marine Optical Characterization Experiment (MOCE‐5). SkinDeEP is an autonomous, vertical profiler for the upper few meters of the ocean. During MOCE‐5, SkinDeEP was deployed on ten separate occasions, and profiles were made at intervals of approximately 1 min each. A total of 976 profiles was acquired during the cruise. The ocean skin temperatures were measured by the Marine Atmosphere Emitted Radiance Interferometer (M‐AERI), an infrared spectroradiometer. Typical meteorological conditions were of low winds and high insolation. The data set provided captures the near‐surface temperature structure that decouples the skin layer from the conventional in situ bulk sea surface temperature (SST) measurements made at a depth of a few meters. Data from SkinDeEP showed strong diurnal warming within the upper few meters, with one extreme case of 4.6 K. There were large discrepancies when computing the skin‐bulk temperature difference with bulk temperatures at different depths. Results also show the strong dependency of the SST on air‐sea heat flux estimates, with warm‐layer errors of almost 60 Wm−2 associated with intense stratification. This indicates the importance of the inclusion of the skin temperature for accurate calculation of latent, sensible, and net longwave heat fluxes.