Dr Helen Beggs¹, Dr Pallavi Govekar¹, Dr Christopher Griffin¹

¹Bureau Of Meteorology, Docklands, Australia

Sea surface temperature (SST) is a vital measurement for marine and climate sciences. As SST strongly modulates air-sea heat fluxes, it is an essential parameter in weather prediction, atmospheric model simulations, seasonal climate outlooks and long-term climate trajectories. It is of great importance to the biodiversity and biogeochemistry of the oceans as well as marine ecosystem dynamics, and as an indicator of ocean currents and eddies near the surface. SST measurements benefit a wide spectrum of operational and research applications, including ocean, weather, climate and seasonal monitoring/forecasting, military operations, marine animal tracking, coral bleaching assessment, commercial fisheries and aquaculture, and environmental management.

The Bureau of Meteorology produces numerous high-resolution satellite-derived SST data products as a contribution to the Integrated Marine Observing System (IMOS).  Selecting the best product for a particular application can be very challenging; there are trade-offs in spatial and temporal resolution, time of day, depth, composition/interpolation method, cloud contamination and accuracy.  This presentation aims to help the user select the most appropriate SST product for their application and find and download these products from the National Computing Infrastructure (NCI) and the Australian Ocean Data Network (AODN). We will highlight a few key Australian operational applications of the IMOS SST products and showcase some exciting newly released IMOS products, including reprocessed 10-minute, hourly, 4-hour and daily SSTs from the Himawari-8 geostationary satellite.

For information regarding the Bureau of Meteorology’s IMOS satellite SST products, see https://opus.nci.org.au/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=141492230 and references therein.

Data are available at:

• NCI: https://opus.nci.org.au/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=141492235
• AODN: http://thredds.aodn.org.au/thredds/catalog/IMOS/SRS/SST/ghrsst/catalog.html

Biography:

Helen Beggs currently works as a Senior Research Scientist in the Satellite Science Team at the Australian Bureau of Meteorology.  Her research interests are in developing and applying satellite-derived sea surface temperature (SST) and sea ice products. Helen leads two IMOS sub-facilities ( Satellite Remote SST Products and Ship of Opportunity SST Sensors for Australian Vessels), and is Principal Investigator for a Bureau study of Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) ocean applications from a potential Australian satellite SAR Pathfinder Mission.