Data fusion of sea-surface temperature data

The problem of data fusion, the merging of data taken by different sensors, becomes ever more relevant with the launch of each new remote-sensing platform. One example of considerable current interest in the climate change community is the production of an improved sea surface temperature (SST) map. In particular, two state-of-the-art instruments - the Along Track Scanning Radiometer (ATSR) and AVHRR - share complementary features: ATSR allows excellent cloud discrimination and atmospheric correction based on its dual-view scanning geometry, but observes only narrow swaths of ocean; AVHRR suffers from low-wavenumber atmospheric distortions and cloud contamination, but has extensive global coverage. The authors propose a methodology for combining ocean skin temperatures from the ATSR and AVHRR instruments to produce a continuous analysis at one-sixth degree spatial and three-day temporal resolutions, together with reliable error estimates, from the fusion of multiple datasets with arbitrary sampling characteristics, resulting in estimated temperatures which unite the precision of ATSR with the superior coverage afforded by AVHRR.