Intercomparison of Sea-surface Temperature Anomaly Fields

Abstract

Sea-surface temperature anomaly fields produced from analysis of HIRS2/MSU data at GLAS for the months November 1979, December 1981, March 1982, and July 1982 were compared to those produced from data from ships, AVHRR, and SMMR in a series of NASA sponsored sea-surface temperature workshops. The methods used by GLAS to analyze the HIRS2/MSU data were made to the algorithm used to retrieve sea and land surface temperatures and in the cloud filtering algorithm. One of the improvements involved generating weights for a given sounding, which decreased with increasing cloudiness and increasing humidity. These weights should be used in generating monthly mean fields. The workshop generated statistics for the weighted HIRS2/MSU field only for the month of July 1982.