Sea Surface Temperature in the Eastern Pacific

Eddies highlight ocean currents in the Agulhas area. This animation from Jan 2011 to Dec 2013 shows high resolution sea surface temperature (SST) in the Agulhas Retroflection off South Africa. Clearly visible in the Agulhas animation are the eddies that form as a result of the retroflection of the current. These eddies can shed or spin off the main current and travel into the South Atlantic. The MUR SST dataset combines data from the Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer (AVHRR), Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS), and Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer for EOS (AMSR-E) instruments, and currently the NAVY Windsat Satellite. More details of the MUR data set may be found at PO.DAAC

Multiscale Ultra Resolution Sea Surface Temperature on a stationary globe. These maps are made mostly from the satellite measurements of Sea Surface Temperature (SST), with help from surface observations that come from ships and bouys. Since the 1980 the SST data from many different satellite is a tricky business. Satellite-based environmental data are usually irregularly sampled and always noisy. Every satellite has a unique sensor that measures SST. The infra-red (IR) type sensor can offer a very high resolution (down to 1 km in horizontal distance) but suffer from contamination by clouds and aerosols that block the signal. The micro-wave (MW) measurements are more reliable because of cloud-penetrating coverage but are coarser (25 km) in resolution and are not useful along the coasts due to contamination from land.So we are interested in making use of the best characteristics of each sensor data — be it resolution or coverage — and finding an optimal and objective ways to fill the data-voids under the clouds and near the coasts. Multiscale Ultra Resolution Sea Surface Temperature on a rotating globe. This is the color bar for the two animations above.