Retrieval of the Ocean Skin Temperature Profiles From Measurements of Infrared Hyperspectral Radiometers—Part II: Field Data Analysis

To obtain the vertical temperature profile of the thermal skin layer on the aqueous side of the ocean-atmosphere interface from radiance measurements of hyperspectral infrared radiometers, regularization methods are used to address the nonlinearity and ill-conditioning of the inverse problem associated with the retrieval. This paper demonstrates the truncated singular value decomposition regularization technique on field data sets obtained from the Marine-Atmospheric Emitted Radiance Interferometer (M-AERI). The M-AERI takes highly accurate and spectrally resolved radiance measurements in the infrared, which allows for the sensing of temperature values within thermal skin layer depths of less than 1 mm below the ocean surface. Results showed temperature inversions found in the solution, but these are deemed unphysical, based on previous tests on synthetic data and by a scaling analysis using the Rayleigh number, which are presented here. The importance of sea surface emissivity for performing the atmospheric correction to M-AERI measurements to derive surface emissivity spectra is also discussed. The retrieved profiles exhibit a smooth exponential-like structure that agrees well with theory.