Evaluation of satellite sea surface temperature in the southern hemisphere using Chinese Antarctic research cruise observations

Abstract

Satellite-based sea surface temperature (SST) measurements in the Southern Hemisphere from the Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer (AVHRR), Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer for the Earth Observing System (AMSR-E) and Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission Microwave Imager (TMI) are compared with in-situ SST measurements obtained from the Chinese National Antarctic Research Expeditions (CHINARE) for the period 1989–2005. Relative to the ship observations, which ranged from the tropics to the Southern Ocean, the AVHRR SST has a mean bias/root mean square error (RMSE) of −0.11°C/0.89°C (–0.04°C/0.93°C for daytime and −0.21°C/0.84°C for night-time), the AMSR-E SST has a mean bias/RMSE of 0.39°C/0.86°C (0.46°C/0.91°C for daytime and 0.32°C/0.80°C for night-time), and the TMI SST has a mean bias/RMSE of 0.63°C/1.28°C (0.57°C/1.23°C for daytime and 0.69°C/1.36°C for night-time). In the Southern Ocean, the AVHRR SST shows persistent cold biases during the daytime and night-time, while the opposite is the case for AMSR-E and TMI SSTs. A discussion of the dependence of the SST biases in the presence of the varying ship SST, surface wind speed and atmospheric water vapour is presented. Additionally, the consistency between microwave and infrared SST is examined to identify regimes that are associated with the observed differences.

Acknowledgements

This research was supported by the NSF OPP Antarctic Program (0838920), NASA NEWS, the National Natural Science Foundation of China (40876099) and the National Key Technologies R&D Program of China (2006BAB18B03). We thank all of those involved in the in-situ SST measurements during the CHINARE.