Fifteen Years of Sea-Surface Temperature from MODIS on Terra: a backwards look and a view to the future.

Abstract:

The launch of the first MODIS on the EOS Terra satellite marked the start of a new era in satellite remote sensing of sea-surface temperature (SST). Of the 36 spectral bands of MODIS, five are in infrared spectral regions suitable for the derivation of SST; this is a significant improvement on the AVHRR, the heritage instrument. In addition, the spectral response functions of MODIS are narrower than those of the AVHRR, the measurements are digitized to 12-bits instead of 10, and the uncertainty in the geolocation of the pixels is much smaller. However, the complexity of the optical design of MODIS led to instrumental artifacts in the infrared measurements, the consequences of which became apparent only after launch. But corrections for these have been developed and applied, so the SST measurements are of high quality and have many applications. The presentation will review progress in developing high quality SSTs and discuss the benefits of the new Version 6 SST algorithms and the SST fields they will produce.