Quality control methods for KOOS operational sea surface temperature products

Abstract

Sea surface temperature SST obtained from the initial version of the Korea Operational Oceanographic System (KOOS) SST satellite have low accuracy during summer and daytime. This is attributed to the diurnal warming effect. Error estimation of SST data must be carried out to use the real-time forecasting numerical model of the KOOS. This study suggests two quality control methods for the KOOS SST system. To minimize the diurnal warming effect, SSTs of areas where wind speed is higher than 5 m/s were used. Depending on the wind threshold value, KOOS SST data for August 2014 were reduced by 0.15 degrees C. Errors in SST data are considered to be a combination of random, sampling, and bias errors. To estimate bias error, the standard deviation of bias between KOOS SSTs and climatology SSTs were used. KOOS SST data yielded an analysis error standard deviation value similar to OSTIA and NOAA NCDC (OISST) data. The KOOS SST shows lower random and sampling errors with increasing number of observations using six satellite datasets. In further studies, the proposed quality control methods for the KOOS SST system will be applied through more long-term case studies and comparisons with other SST systems.