GOES-8 Imagery as A new Source of Data to Conduct Ocean Feature Tracking

摘要

Sequential imagery from the AVHRR has been used to conduct ocean feature tracking since the early 1980s. One of the primary limitations with AVHRR data for feature tracking is the lack of temporal continuity, since it is only possible to obtain coverage from the same satellite once every 12 hours. Thus for the highly variable flows which are often encountered in coastal areas, undersampling can be a serious problem. With the availability of imagery every half hour from the new imager on the GOES-8 and 9 satellites, the possiblity oftracking features on shorter time scales should be considered. Also, the higher sampling rate on GOES could be particulary beneficial in obtaining cloud-free coverage of the ocean. However, unlike the AVHRR which has 1 km resolution, the new imager on GOES has 4 km resolution in the IR channels. Thus, even for relatively vigorous currents, it will take at least several hours for a feature to be advected over a distance of one pixel, and considerably longer to generate displacements which can be reliably estimated.