A new high-resolution sea surface temperature blended analysis

AbstractThe National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) office of National Environmental Satellite, Data, and Information Service (NESDIS) now generates a daily 0.05° (∼5 km) global high-resolution satellite-based sea surface temperature (SST) analyses on an operational basis. The new analysis combines SST data from U.S., Japanese, and European geostationary infrared imagers, and low-Earth-orbiting infrared (United States and Europe) SST data, into a single high-resolution 5-km product. An earlier version produced a 0.1° (∼11 km) resolution, a resolution chosen to approximate the Nyquist sampling criterion for the midlatitude Rossby radius (∼20 km), in order to preserve mesoscale oceanographic features such as eddies and frontal meanders. Comparison between the two analyses illustrates that the higher-resolution grid spacing has more success in this regard. The analysis employs a rigorous multiscale optimum interpolation (OI) methodology that approximates the Kalman filter, together with a da...