Sea Surface Temperature Explorer

LSU's GOES-East ABI de-clouded nighttime SST composite products are produced from the CONUS 4-micron brightness temperatures at 08h00 daily. A more detailed description of the methodology and applications can be found in Walker et al (2003, 2005, 2011). The transition from GOES GVAR to GOES ABI at ESL occurred on January 1, 2018. A regional SST algorithm was developed using fixed Gulf buoy 1 m SST from ~150 data points with an R2 of 0.99. The ABI sensor provides 2 x 2 km spatial resolution and potential repeat coverage every 5 minutes. Two Gulf images are produced daily with and without a cloud-mask. The NW Atlantic region was recently added as a pilot project. Note that the LSU SST product is NOT a MEAN SST product as it is produced by retaining the warmest values at every pixel location from a night-time sequence of ~100 images. Gulf SST spatial structure varies throughout the year for many reasons; such as cool river water discharges, rapid summer heating of buoyant river plumes, winter-storm chilling of bays and inner shelf waters, coastal upwelling, Loop Current and eddy motions, and cool wakes which evolve rapidly due to hurricane air-sea interactions. The MUR SST options show the NASA/JPL Multi-scale Ultra-high Resolution daily sea surface temperature analysis rendered for the same ESL Gulf of America and NW Atlantic map regions. MUR is a blended Level 4 analysis that combines multiple satellite and in situ observations into a gap-filled SST field, so it differs from the ESL GOES ABI regional retrieval that is built from nighttime 4-micron brightness temperatures. Because MUR is a daily analysis product with source-data processing latency, the newest MUR SST image may lag the current date; the viewer shows the most recent MUR analysis available from the source archive. Including MUR provides a complementary daily reference product for comparison with the ESL GOES SST imagery, especially where clouds or data gaps affect individual satellite scenes.