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Long-Term Variations in the Pixel-to-Pixel Variability of NOAA AVHRR SST Fields from 1982 to 2015



Details

  • Journal Title:
    Remote Sensing
  • Personal Author:
  • NOAA Program & Office:
    NOS (National Ocean Service)
  • Description:
    Sea surface temperature (SST) fields obtained from the series of space-borne five-channel Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometers (AVHRRs) provide the longest continuous time series of global SST available to date (1981–present). As a result, these data have been used for many studies and significant effort has been devoted to their careful calibration in an effort to provide a climate quality data record. However, little attention has been given to the local precision of the SST retrievals obtained from these instruments, which we refer to as the pixel-to-pixel (p2p) variability, a characteristic important in the ability to resolve structures such as ocean fronts characterized by small gradients in the SST field. In this study, the p2p variability is estimated for Level-2 SST fields obtained with the Pathfinder retrieval algorithm for AVHRRs on NOAA-07, 9, 11, 12 and 14-19. These estimates are stratified by year, season, day/night and along-scan/along-track. The overall variability ranges from 0.10 K to 0.21 K. For each satellite, the along-scan variability is between 10 and 20% smaller than the along-track variability (except for NOAA-16 nighttime for which it is approximately 30% smaller) and the summer and fall σ s are between 10 and 15% smaller than the winter and spring σ s. The differences between along-track and along-scan are attributed to the way in which the instrument has been calibrated. The seasonal differences result from the T 4 − T 5 term in the Pathfinder retrieval algorithm. This term is shown to be a major contributor to the p2p variability and it is shown that its impact could be substantially reduced without a deleterious effect on the overall p2p σ of the resulting products by spatially averaging it as part of the retrieval process. The AVHRR/3s (NOAA-15 through 19) were found to be relatively stable with trends in the p2p variability of at most 0.015 K/decade.
  • Keywords:
  • Source:
    Remote Sensing, 11(7), 844
  • DOI:
  • ISSN:
    2072-4292
  • Format:
    PDF
  • Publisher:
    MDPI AG
  • Document Type:
    Journal Article
  • Funding:
    Grant no. NA11NOS0120167
  • License:
  • Rights Information:
    CC BY
  • Compliance:
    Library
  • Main Document Checksum:
    urn:sha256:589f57cc80f2f70039d93c00c49eae252ed0d2112b81a8e11b992fad517c2c49
  • Download URL:
  • File Type:
    Filetype[PDF - 1.35 MB ]
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