The Role of Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer 2 Channels within an Optimal Estimation Scheme for Sea Surface Temperature

Kevin Pearson,Owen Embury,Craig Donlon,Christopher Merchant

doi:10.3390/rs10010090

Abstract

We present an analysis of information content for sea surface temperature (SST) retrieval from the Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer 2 (AMSR2). We find that SST uncertainty of ∼0.37 K can be achieved within an optimal estimation framework in the presence of wind, water vapour and cloud liquid water effects, given appropriate assumptions for instrumental uncertainty and prior knowledge, and using all channels. We test all possible combinations of AMSR2 channels and demonstrate the importance of including cloud liquid water in the retrieval vector. The channel combinations, with the minimum number of channels, that carry most SST information content are calculated, since in practice calibration error drives a trade-off between retrieved SST uncertainty and the number of channels used. The most informative set of five channels is 6.9 V, 6.9 H, 7.3 V, 10.7 V and 36.5 H and these are suitable for optimal estimation retrievals. We discuss the relevance of microwave SSTs and issues related to them compared to SSTs derived from infra-red observations.

Highlights

Sea surface temperature (SST) is a geophysical quantity of fundamental importance in the Earth system, since it is a controlling factor in air-sea fluxes [1,2] and profoundly influences atmospheric and oceanographic thermodynamics [3], dynamics [4,5] and coupled interactions [6].Near-real time estimation of global SST at adequate spatial resolution is crucial to weather forecasting by numerical weather prediction (NWP, [7]) and errors in knowledge of SST can materially degrade weather forecast skill [8,9]
0.94 m·s−1 for each wind component. We extend this approach using a retrieval vector with five variables: xT = the four variables SST (Ts) that includes the logarithm of total cloud liquid water (TCLW) (L)
This misattribution is naturally largest for those channels that are most sensitive to TCLW where the “observed” values are most affected and which result in the largest retrieval errors

Summary

Introduction

Sea surface temperature (SST) is a geophysical quantity of fundamental importance in the Earth system, since it is a controlling factor in air-sea fluxes [1,2] and profoundly influences atmospheric and oceanographic thermodynamics [3], dynamics [4,5] and coupled interactions [6].Near-real time estimation of global SST at adequate spatial resolution is crucial to weather forecasting by numerical weather prediction (NWP, [7]) and errors in knowledge of SST can materially degrade weather forecast skill [8,9]. SST is used as the measure of Earth’s surface temperature over oceans [10,11,12] and is a key metric of climatic variability and change whose global evolution can be estimated back to the mid-19th Century [12]. Radiometers (AVHRRs) have been operated since 1979 with channels supporting SST estimation, using differential-absorption-based techniques to account for the influence of the atmosphere on infra-red (IR) brightness temperatures [15,16,17,18]. Reprocessing of multi-decadal satellite SST datasets has concentrated on IR sensors, namely, the AVHRRs [19] and Along Track Scanning Radiometers (ATSRs; [20]). Merchant et al [21] more recently used both AVHRRs and ATSRs jointly to develop a blended, gap-filled analysis for climate applications, analogous to the SST analyses produced operationally for NWP [9,22], but with more attention to long-term stability

Objectives

Discussion

Conclusion