Skin Sea Surface Temperatures From the GOES-16 ABI Validated With Those of the Shipborne M-AERI

Derived from satellite measurements, the skin sea surface temperature (SST
_skin
) is a critical variable in research into the climate and other aspects of the ocean–atmosphere system As the new generation of visible and infrared imaging radiometers, the Advanced Baseline Imager (ABI) onboard the current U.S. geostationary satellites series provides marked improvements to remote sensing of the ocean surface from geostationary orbit, including a wider range of spectral bands and more rapid sampling. This research compares SST
_skin
derived from the ABI onboard the Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite (GOES)-16 satellite from January 2018 to October 2019 with the independent data acquired from Marine-Atmospheric Emitted Radiance Interferometers (M-AERIs) deployed on ships. The result shows an averaged SST
_skin
mean bias of 0.086 K and a robust standard deviation of 0.220 K. The properties of the bias are determined based on various aspects such as geographical distribution, day/night, aerosol effect, and satellite zenith angle. This study also shows that the ABI sensor-specific error statistics (SSES) are effective to reduce the errors by slant-path water vapor and satellite zenith angle. The main result of this research is that the SST
_skin
products derived from the ABI compare well with independent, International System of Units (SI)-traceable radiometric skin temperatures taken from ships, and this should give confidence in the use of these remotely-sensed SST
_skin
fields for many scientific endeavors. Some remaining challenges have been identified for algorithm developers to address, and we hope these will be pursued in due course.