Data Fusion Analysis of Sea Surface Temperature from HY-2A Satellite Radiometer

The global sea surface is not seamlessly covered by the along-track sea surface temperature (SST) data of the scanning microwave radiometer (SMR) aboard the Haiyang-2A (HY-2A) satellite, the first ocean dynamic environment satellite of China. In this paper, this coverage problem was solved by data fusion. The whole procedure includes the following steps. First, SST data within 200km of the coastline were removed, and so were outliers. Second, the HY-2A SST data were gridded, filtered and corrected. Third, the inverse distance weighted (IDW) method was used to merge the HY-2A SST data into those from an operational, highresolution, combined sea surface temperature and sea ice analysis (OSTIA) system. The Global 1-km Sea Surface Temperature (G1SST) data were used as the reference data. The root mean square (RMS) difference between the along-track SST data of HY-2A and the G1SST SST data is 1.3 degrees C. The HY-2A SST data were about 83% left and the RMS is 0.7 degrees C after preprocessing. The along-track SST data of HY-2A can be well used for data fusion. The RMS for the fusion results is 0.6 degrees C, and the gaps between tracks were filled up.