Operational production of multichannel sea surface temperatures from NOAA polar satellite AVHRR data

Pichel, W

Data from the Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer (AVHRR) flown on the NOAA series of polar-orbiting environmental satellites have been used to produce operational sea surface temperature (SST) products since January 1979. With the implementation of linear Multichannel SST (MCSST) equations and multichannel cloud screening tests in November 1981, accuracy and resolution improved significantly. Recently (March 1990), accuracy has been improved again with the implementation of nonlinear SST equations. When compared with drifting buoy SST observations, daytime and nighttime satellite SST observations produced from these new equations have global biases less than 0.3°C and standard deviations less than 0.7°C. From a daily global set of approximately 120,000 SST observations at 8 km resolution, series of operational products are produced routinely, some of which are of interest to the climate community.