Validation of satellite-derived sea surface temperatures for waters around Taiwan

1 Department of Environmental Biology and Fisheries Science, National Taiwan Ocean University, Keelung, Taiwan, ROC 2 Center for Atmospheric and Oceanic Studies, Faculty of Science, Tohoku University, Sendai, Japan 3 Ocean Data Bank of National Center for Ocean Research, Taipei 106, Taiwan * Corresponding author address: Prof. Ming-An Lee , Department of Environmental Biology and Fisheries Science, National Taiwan Ocean University, Keelung, Taiwan, ROC; E-mail: malee@mail.ntou.edu.tw In order to validate the Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer (AVHRR)-derived sea surface temperatures (SST) of the waters around Taiwan, we generated a match-up data set of 961 pairs, which included in situ SSTs and concurrent AVHRR measurements for the period of 1998 to 2002. Availability of cloud-free images, i.e., images with more than 85% of cloud-free area in their coverage, was about 2.23% of all AVHRR images during the study period. The range of in situ SSTs was from 10.5°C to 30.8°C. The satellite derived-SSTs through MCSST and NLSST algorithms were linearly related to the in situ SSTs with correlation coefficients of 0.985 and 0.98, respectively. The MCSSTs and NLSSTs had small biases of 0.009 C° and 0.256 C° with root mean square deviations of 0.64 C° and 0.801 C°, respectively, therefore the AVHRR-based MCSSTs and NLSSTs had high accuracy in the seas around Taiwan. (