Unless noted otherwise, all seminars take place at:
World Weather Building
Science Center
5200 Auth Road, Room 707
Camp Springs, MD 20746
Off-site participants may listen to seminars via conference call.
Dial-in Numbers for Seminars
Domestic:
1-866-715-2479
International:
1-517-345-5260
Passcode:
9457557
Slides for each presentation should be available for download in PDF
format on this page, the day before each talk.
Unless specifically noted otherwise, the points of
contact for the JCSDA seminar series are: Christina Bacon, 301-763-8154 x188 and
George Ohring.
Presenters:
If you are a presenter and are going to be giving a talk with slides
at a JCSDA seminar, please follow these guidelines
on presentation file preparation.
Title
High-Resolution MODIS /AMSR-E Composite SST
for Diagnostic and Regional Weather Prediction Studies
Accurate high resolution specification of sea surface
temperature (SST) is important for regional weather forecasting
studies and coastal ocean applications. Chelton et al. (2007) and
Lacasse et al. (2008) showed that the use of coarse resolution SST
products such as from the real-time global (RTG) SST analysis
(Thiebaux et al. 2003) in regional weather forecast models do not
properly portray the fluxes of heat and moisture from the ocean
that drive the formation of low level clouds and precipitation.
High resolution SSTs may also be important for hurricane track and
intensity forecasts and useful to verification of ocean
circulation models. A polar orbiting data compositing technique,
which provides spatially continuous, accurate, high-resolution SST
fields using data from the Moderate-resolution Imaging
Spectrometer (MODIS) on NASA's Terra and Aqua satellites, was
developed by Haines et al. (2007). Case et al. (2008) presented a
detailed analysis of the impact of the composite SST product in
coastal regions. However, the approach was limited during periods
of long-term cloud cover where latency of past data reduced the
accuracy of the data presented in the composites. Recently, an
enhanced compositing technique was developed to circumvent
shortcomings of the Haines et al. (2007) approach by including
AMSR-E SST data in the compositing process. The enhanced scheme
also incorporates a more sophisticated temporal weighting scheme
which considers bias, observational errors and spatial resolution
along with the latency of the SST data in the generation of the
high resolution composites. The enhanced SST composite product is
produced four times a day in near real-time over the ocean regions
surrounding the continental U.S. The product is being integrated
into NASA's Short Term Prediction and Research Transition (SPoRT)
project (Jedlovec et al. 2006) and distributed to the NWS, other
government agencies, and the public for use in regional weather
forecast applications. Prospective users can also get this product
from the Physical Oceanography DAAC in standard L3P format later
this year. The presentation will describe this work and present
examples of the impact of the product on short-term weather
forecasts.