Experimental Reprocessing v1.2 results

The current phase of the SST CCI project involves two strands:

• migration of all components of a previously distributed system to one location where all data are held and significant processing power is available
• improvements to the way we derive sea surface temperature to achieve the stringent requirements of our users

Making improvements is an iterative process, where we introduce innovations progressively and validate they have positive impact. The team is currently assessing our most recent large-scale reprocessing, for which the new smooth-atmosphere algorithms have been used, along with other minor changes (e.g., to the prior assumptions used in optimal estimation).

The summary is that the stability of the AVHRR data streams is clearly improved, both with respect to the calibration anomalies on some instruments and sensitivity to desert dust outbreaks over the ocean.

Being experimental, we are not promoting use of this version of the data, but it can be shared with any interested researchers.

The next experiment reprocessing run will attempt to derive SSTs for the 1980s using our system, for the first time. It is due around the end of this year.