Sentinel-3 SLSTR SST Validation using a Fiducial Reference Measurements (FRM) Service

ESA is building on almost 15 years of continuous Fiducial Reference Measurements (FRM) from UK-funded shipborne radiometers by establishing a service to provide historic and ongoing FRM measurements to the wider SST community through an International SST FRM Radiometer Network (ships4sst). The ships4sst is open for partners around the world, currently compromising of partners from the UK (University of Southampton, Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, Space ConneXions), Denmark (Danish Meteorological Institute) and France (Ifremer) and will not only collect Shipborne radiometer data but also use the data to validate SLSTR and other satellite SST products with the Felyx MDB tool.

Included in the service is a long term data archive of the FRM datasets at Ifremer where the data will be stored in the ships4sst netCDF L2R format. We will show examples of the ships4sst data and demonstrate its use with the newest SLSTR validation results from the ships4sst network regions, showing that SLSTR performs at least as well as its predecessor AATSR. We will also show results of the SLSTR A and B units during the Sentinel-3 tandem phase in 2018 by using triple collocations on the ships4sst FRM data and the SLSTR units on Sentinel 3 A and B.