Estimation of 4-Km All-Sky Sea Surface Temperature from Thermal Infrared and Passive Microwave Remote Sensing Observations

Sea surface temperature (SST) is a vital parameter at the earth-atmosphere interface. Current method can derive an all-sky SST at resolution up to 6 km by integrating thermal infrared (TIR) and passive microwave (PMW) remote sensing. However, due to the swath gap of the polar-orbit PMW sensors, current TIR-PMW integrated SST are not spatial-seamless (i.e. all-sky available). By integrating GCOM-W1 AMSR2 and FengYun-3B MWRI observations, this paper fills the BT inside the swath gap to reconstruct a spatial-seamless PMW brightness temperature (BT) and then introduces Aqua MODIS SST to estimates a 4-km all-sky SST, the spatial resolution and coverage of which outperforms the current TIR-PMW integrated SST. Results show that the reconstructed BT highly agrees with the original BT and the estimated SST has accuracy of 0.67 K-0.72 K when validated against in-situ SST. This study would be beneficial for associated studies such as climate change on large scales.