Method for Creation of Merged Dataset for SST Estimation with Thermal and Microwave Radiometer Data

Method for creation of merged dataset for Sea Surface Temperature (SST) estimation with Thermal Infrared Radiometer (TIR) and Microwave Scanning Radiometer (MSR) onboard satellites considering geophysical properties of sea surfaces are proposed. Interaction between radiometer and the observation target of SST are different between TIR and MSR depending on the geophysical properties of the sea surface. Therefore, the proposed method is based on interaction mechanism which depends on a variety of sea surface conditions which can be derived from Community Radiative Transfer Model (CRTM) provided by NOAA. An example of Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) satellite based TIR and MSR, Visible Infrared Scanner (VIRS) and TRMM Microwave Imager (TMI) is shown in this paper. SST is estimated, independently, with VIRS or TMI. Sea surface characteristics are different between thermal infrared and microwave, obviously. Therefore, the difference has to be considered for estimation of SST. The experimental results with TMI/SST image and VIRS/SST image show that Root Mean Square (RMS) error ranges from 0.87 to 0.91 °C.