Ocean Surface Current Reconstruction: On the Transfer Function between Infrared SST and along-track altimeter observations

The potentiality of retrieving high spatial resolution velocity fields by exploiting the synergy between nearly simultaneous observations of infrared SST and along-track altimetry is shown here through a case study in the Gulf Stream region. The presented approach relies on the characterization of a transfer function between the SST observations and the streamfunction of the flow and allows to improve the spatial resolution and the effective scales of the retrieved velocity field.