Small-Scale Physical Processes and Mixing in Coastal Oceans

Skin sea surface temperature (SST), one of the major properties that controls heat and gas exchange through the air-sea interface, is the temperature of the first few microns of the sea surface. Satellites equipped with high-resolution radiometers provide skin SST with relatively large spatial coverage of the ocean surface. Temporal coverage, however, is limited to daily time-scales. On the other hand, instrumentation on buoys can continuously collect bulk SST on much shorter time intervals, e.g. down to seconds, but at depths of tens of cm to a few m. These temperatures may differ by a few tenths of a degree Celsius from the skin SST. The objective of this research is to provide an algorithm, based on surface meteorological parameters, to correct bulk SST measurements taken in coastal regions from moored instrumentation to accurately compute skin SST on short time scales (e.g. hours) or at times when remotely sensed data might be unavailable.