Sea surface temperature (SST) is a vital measurement for marine and climate sciences. It is of great importance to the biodiversity and biogeochemistry of the oceans as well as marine ecosystem dynamics, and as an indicator of ocean currents and eddies near the surface. SST measurements benefit a wide spectrum of operational and research applications, including ocean, weather, climate and seasonal monitoring/forecasting, military operations, coral bleaching assessment, commercial fisheries and aquaculture, and environmental management.
The Bureau of Meteorology produces numerous high-resolution satellite-derived SST data products as a contribution to the Integrated Marine Observing System (IMOS). Selecting the best product for a particular application can be challenging; there are trade-offs in spatial and temporal resolution, time of day, depth, composition/interpolation method, cloud contamination and accuracy. This presentation will help the user select the most appropriate SST product for their application and find and download these products from the National Computing Infrastructure and the Australian Ocean Data Network. We will highlight a few key Australian operational applications of the IMOS SST products and showcase exciting new IMOS products, including reprocessed 10-minute, hourly, 4-hour and daily SSTs from the Himawari-8 geostationary satellite, and real-time SSTs from its replacement, Himawari-9.