Accurate retrieval of sea surface temperature in the Canary Islands-Azores-Gibraltar area using AVHRR/3 and MODIS data

The retrieval of the sea surface temperature (SST) from space is limited by radiometer noise and window placement, in-flight calibration quality, viewing geometry and, specially, by the atmospheric correction. Thus, the potential for highly accurate SST measurements has led to considerable interest within the research community in the development and assessment of new multi-channel atmospheric correction algorithms. The essential objective in this work is to optimize the split-window algorithm coefficients obtained for the AVHRR/2 sensors, for the retrieval of SST in the Canary Islands-Azores-Gibraltar area from AVHRR/3 instruments. The proposed AVHRR/3 split-window algorithm has been compared with the NESDIS operational multichannel algorithms (MCSST) and, finally, the MODIS SST algorithms have been assessed in our oceanographic area. In both cases, the residues obtained demonstrated the ability to achieve good results in sea surface temperature recovery.