Sea Surface Temperature Monthly Means and Variance in the Australian Region

Full description

The CSIRO Marine Research Remote Sensing facility automatically receives and archives data from the USA's National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) satellites. Up to 18 passes per day are tracked to receive data. The Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer (AVHRR) data is received on the High Resolution Picture Transmission (HRPT) signal. Within an hour of reception, these data are automatically processed into full resolution sea surface temperature (SST) images. Raw data originate from the AVHRR sensor on various NOAA polar orbiting satellites, received at various stations around Australia and consolidated ("stitched") by the CSIRO Earth Observation Centre. The stitching removes redundancy and minimises data corruption. Processing from the stitched archive to produce SST is carried out in the CMAR Remote Sensing Facility in Hobart using the split window algorithm of McMillin for NOAA9 and NOAA12 satellites and the NLSST (NOAA non-linear SST) algorithm for the other satellites. Cloud-clearing is performed based on the algorithm of Saunders and Kriebel. Each map is made by combining the estimates over the composite period using a time and spatial neighbourhood median filtering method. Each pixel of the images is the 65 percentile of all cloud-cleared SST estimates during the composite period and within a 4x4 km region. The compositing process also removes most residual cloud contamination. This basedata has been produced by CSIRO for the National Oceans Office, for the purposes of marine mapping, as part of an ongoing commitment to natural resource planning and management through the 'National Marine Bioregionalisation' project. Compositing attempts to overcome the problem of cloud coverage. The compositing technique used here takes the median value of a 4 by 4 neighbourhood of 1km resolution pixels over all the data available for that time period. If there has not been at least one cloud free view of a point on the ground during the composite period, the value recorded may show a false low temperature.

Lineage

Progress Code: onGoing

Maintenance and Update Frequency: continual

Statement: Captured from NASA Satellite data and processed further at CSIRO Marine Research.