Sea Surface Temperature Measurements from Thermal Infrared Satellite Instruments: Status and Outlook

摘要

Thermal Infrared (TIR) sensors have been deployed on earth observing satellites for over 30 years providing measurements of Sea Surface Temperature (SST), clouds and many other products. Developed initially for meteorology and now used widely by the oceanographic and climate communities, TIR derived SST measurements are available in an operational context in Near Real Time (NRT) from a wide variety of satellite missions. TIR sensors have a characteristically high spatial resolution of 0.5-1.1 km (at nadir) with quasi global coverage on a daily basis (using two operational wide swath TIR missions). TIR sensors are typically calibrated using on-board reference blackbody systems alone (e.g. Corlett et al., 2006) or a combination of blackbody and deep-space "cold" views to an accuracy of 0.1-0.2 K (e.g. Robinson, 2004). On-board calibration is sometimes supplemented with vicarious calibration adjustments implicit in some Level-2 SST retrieval algorithms that com-pensate for the atmospheric attenuation of water leaving radiances using in-situ SST measurements (e.g. Kilpatrick et al., 2001; Zhang et al., 2009). Other approaches to atmospheric correction rely on the use of radiative transfer modes to derive look-up-tables that can be applied to brightness temperature measurements using a suitable SST retrieval algorithm (e.g. Merchant and Le Borgne, 2004). C.