Towards an Observation Operator for Satellite Retrievals of Sea Surface Temperature with Convolutional Neural Network

Global ocean numerical models typically have their first vertical level about 0.5m below the sea surface. However, a key physical quantity like the sea surface temperature (SST) can be retrieved from satellites at a reference depth of a few microns or millimeters below the sea surface. Assimilating such temperatures can lead to bias in the ocean models and it is thus necessary to project the satellite retrievals to the first model level to safely use them in the assimilation process. This projection is non-trivial, since it depends on several factors (e.g., daily cycle, winds, latitude) and it is usually performed either with computationally expensive numerical models or with too simple statistical methods. In this work we present an attempt to construct the projection operator with machine learning techniques. We consider three different networks: a convolutional neural network architecture called U-Net, which was first introduced in the field of computer vision and image segmentation, and it is thus optimal to process satellite retrievals; a pix2pix network, which is a U-Net trained in an adversarial way against a patch-classifier discriminator; a random forest model, which is a more traditional machine learning technique. We train the networks with L3 global subskin SST from AVHRR’s infrared channels on MetOp satellites produced by OSISAF and wind speed analysis at 10m by ECMWF to reproduce the ESA SST CCI and C3S global SST reprocessed product by CMEMS, that we take as ground truth during training and validation. The pix2pix network is the most effective in the projection and we thus choose it to shape an observation operator for the CMCC’s OceanVar assimilation system. Finally, we compare several one-year-long reanalysis-like experiments, based on the CMCC reanalysis system, that assimilate the SST in different ways, e.g. nudging, unbiased approach, as observation operator. We discuss the potential impact of such new scheme in providing the best surface ocean state estimate.