Validation Satellite Sea Surface Temperature in the Coastal Regions
Eun-Young Lee, Kyung‐Ae Park
Abstract
Validation of daily Optimum Interpolation Sea Surface Temperature (OISST) data from 1982 to 2018 was performed by comparison with quality-controlled in-situ water temperature data from Korea Oceanographic Data Center observations in the Korean coastal regions. In contrast to the relatively high accuracy of the SSTs in the open ocean, the SSTs of the coastal regions exhibited large root-mean-square errors (RMSE) and a bias, which tended to be amplified towards the coastal lines. The coastal SSTs in the Yellow Sea presented much higher RMSE and bias due to the appearance of cold water on the surface induced by tidal mixing over shallow bathymetry. The long-term trends of OISSTs were also compared with those of in-situ water temperatures over decades. Although the trends of OISSTs deviate from those of in-situ temperatures in coastal regions, the spatial patterns of the OISST trends revealed a similar structure to those of in-situ temperature trends.