Production of an enhanced blended infrared and microwave sea surface temperature product

The simultaneous availability of infrared and passive microwave satellite sensors provides highly complementary information enabling the creation of improved all-weather, high-resolution sea surface temperature (SST) products. Existing SST products from the infrared advanced very high resolution radiometer and TRMM microwave imager are blended to produce daily, pre-dawn, 0.25deg resolution SST grids representative of the temperature at 1-m depth. Complex spatial and temporal differences between the original products resulting from different retrieval errors and measurement times are first addressed using derived bias adjustments and diurnal warming corrections. The products are then combined using an optimal interpolation approach that accounts for differing uncertainties in the products. Evaluation of the resulting analyzed SSTs with buoy observations demonstrates that the bias corrections improve the accuracy of the products making them comparable to single-sensor products but with improved sampling. Diurnal corrections based on limited forcing data reduce bias in the analysis but add scatter, suggesting further improvements are required