SEA SURFACE TEMPERATURE RETRIEVAL USING TRMM MICROWAVE IMAGER DATA IN SOUTH CHINA SEA

The passive microwave TRMM Microwave Imager (TMI) sensor which is payload of the Tropical Rainfall Measurement Mission (TRMM) satellite was launched in 1997 by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and National Space Development Agency of Japan (NASDA). The TMI provides daily maps, 3 day average, weekly and monthly binary data via internet that can be used to retrieve geophysical parameters such as sea surface temperature (SST), surface wind speed, atmospheric water vapor, liquid cloud water and precipitation rates. This paper reports on a study that was carried out to map the sea surface temperature over South China Sea using TMI data from 10.7 GHz channel. The advantage of using this data is that the SST can be measured through clouds which are nearly transparent on this channel. This is distinct advantage over the traditional infrared SST observations that require a cloud-free field of view. In this study multitemporal TMI binary data were processed using FORTRAN Programming Language to evaluate the SST variations with time over the study area. Comparisons between SST from TMI data and in-situ SST differ by about ± 0.2 o C.