A deterministic inversion technique for sea surface temperature retrieval from MODIS radiances

摘要

The MODIS advanced sensor contains 16 channels in the thermal infrared band, makes it an attractive instrument for atmospheric and oceanic sciences. Even for satellite-derived sea surface temperature (SST) retrievals, the dynamics of atmospheric conditions are intended to be characterized by the satellite measurement sufficiently to retrieve good quality SST. The Group for High Resolution SST (GHRSST), which is an international scientific body, provides MODIS SST to date using only two and/or three channels by employing regression method. The few coefficients used in regression based retrieval methods are unable to compensate for wide atmospheric variability and as a result, significant errors are embedded in the retrieved SST. We will demonstrate in this work that the MODIS SST can be retrieved with approximately double the accuracy compared GHRSST operational SST, by using more channels and our physical deterministic-based modified total least squares (MTLS) method. This study also includes the SST4/NLSST and optimal estimation based SST retrieval for comparison purposes. The information content and noise analysis of these retrievals, and the retrieval error due to the quality of cloud detection is discussed.