Estimating Sea Surface Currents Based on Himawari-8 Sea Surface Temperature Data

In this paper, the sea surface currents in the offshore area of Lianyungang, China, were derived from the hourly sea surface temperature data provided by Himawari-8 satellite by using the Maximum Cross-Correlation (MCC) method. We set different parameters of the template window size, time interval and search length in MCC method and compared the estimated currents with in-situ measurements of the High-Frequency Surface Wave Radar. The results show that the template window size has the greatest influence on the accuracy of the retrieved currents, while the search length has the smallest effect. Both the Root Mean Square Error (RMSE) in speed and the average error in direction decrease with the increase of the template window size regardless of the time interval or search length. Overall, the RMSE decreases with the increase of time interval, but $\theta$ slightly increases. The shorter the search length, the smaller the error of result is. The RMSE of the derived speed and $\theta$ of the current direction without quality control are 0.19 m/s and 33.01°, respectively, when the template window size is set as 45 km×45 km, the time interval is 6 h, and the search length is 10 km.