Abstract
The Operational Sea Surface Temperature and Sea Ice Analysis (OSTIA) system generates global, daily, gap-filled foundation sea surface temperature (SST) fields from satellite data and in situ observations. The SSTs have uncertainty information provided with them and an ice concentration (IC) analysis is also produced. Additionally, a global, hourly diurnal skin SST product is output each day. The system is run in near real time to produce data for use in applications such as numerical weather prediction. Data production is monitored routinely and outputs are available from the Copernicus Marine Environment Monitoring Service (CMEMS; marine.copernicus.eu). As an operational product, the OSTIA system is continuously under development. For example, since the original descriptor paper was published, the underlying data assimilation scheme that is used to generate the foundation SST analyses has been updated. Various publications have described these changes but a full description is not available in a single place. This technical note focuses on the production of the foundation SST and IC analyses by OSTIA and aims to provide a comprehensive description of the current system configuration.
Highlights
IntroductionThe Operational Sea Surface Temperature and Sea Ice Analysis (OSTIA) system was developed at the Met Office (the UK’s national meteorological service; https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/) to meet its need for near real time, accurate, global sea surface temperature (SST) data for numerical weather prediction (NWP) [1]
The Operational Sea Surface Temperature and Sea Ice Analysis (OSTIA) system was developed at the Met Office to meet its need for near real time, accurate, global sea surface temperature (SST) data for numerical weather prediction (NWP) [1]
Other changes to the OSTIA system have been the introduction of estimates of lake water temperatures and ice concentration (IC) [15], updates to the error covariance estimates that are crucial to the merging of the input data and an increase to the number of iterations of the Analysis Correction (AC) assimilation scheme to converge more closely on the solution [16], and, most recently, an update that improved the resolution of SST features in the analyses [17]
Summary
The Operational Sea Surface Temperature and Sea Ice Analysis (OSTIA) system was developed at the Met Office (the UK’s national meteorological service; https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/) to meet its need for near real time, accurate, global sea surface temperature (SST) data for numerical weather prediction (NWP) [1]. It uses SST observations from in situ observing instruments such as drifting buoys in combination with satellite SST data from a variety of sensors to form daily, globally complete, model-free analyses of foundation. The aim of this technical note is to provide a summary of the current configuration
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