Sea Surface Temperature of the Bay of Bengal Derived from the TRMM Microwave Imager

Bhat, GS and Vecchi, GA and Gadgil, S (2004) Sea Surface Temperature of the Bay of Bengal Derived from the TRMM Microwave Imager. In: Journal of Atmospheric and Oceanic Technology, 21 (8). pp. 1283-1290.

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Abstract

The Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) Microwave Imager (TMI) with the capability of measuring sea surface temperature (SST) in the presence of clouds, has been providing an unprecedented view of tropical basin-scale SST variability. In this paper, an assessment of the accuracy of the SST derived from TMI over the Bay of Benga using in situ data collected from moored buoys and research ships, is presented. The authors find that TMI captures the evolution of the SST of the bay on seasonal time scales with reasonable accuracy. The mean difference between the SST from TMI and buoys is less than 0.1$^{\mathrm{0}}C$,and the rms difference is about 0.6$^{\mathrm{0}}C$. The time scales of the intraseasonal variation of the TMI SST are realistic. However, the amplitude of the SST variation on the intraseasonal scale is overestimated by a factor of about 1.3 when compared to buoy data. It is observed that the SST derived from TMI tends to be lower during periods with deep convection or winds stronger than 10$m s^{\mathrm{-1}}$, or both. There is better agreement during weak conditions of convection/wind. This leads to a cold bias during convectively active periods when running average SST time series are constructed from SSTs retrieved from the TMI.

Item Type:	Journal Article
Publication:	Journal of Atmospheric and Oceanic Technology
Publisher:	American Meteorological Society
Additional Information:	Copyright for this article belongs to American Meteorological Society.
Department/Centre:	Division of Mechanical Sciences > Centre for Atmospheric & Oceanic Sciences
Date Deposited:	26 Oct 2004
Last Modified:	19 Sep 2010 04:16
URI:	http://eprints.iisc.ac.in/id/eprint/2121

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