Towards a New SST Dataset - Capturing Historic El Nino Events

Abstract: Sea Surface Temperature (SST) is an essential climate variable (ECV). Gridded SST datasets are used in many applications including global climate monitoring, evaluation of climate model simulations, providing boundary conditions for reanalysis datasets, and for understanding air-sea interactions. Surface marine observations extend back over 200 years and century-scale historical global datasets typically consist of monthly temperature values; these datasets may not be in-filled to provide complete spatial coverage. Gridded data products that span the period when satellite measurements of SST are available are typically of global extent and are available at much higher resolution.  This poster will present ongoing work on a new gridded SST dataset that bridges the space and time scales between the existing long historical records and the high-resolution records for the past few decades.  

The focus of this poster is an overview and analysis of past El Nino Southern Oscillation (ENSO) events using a new global, in-filled dataset of SST, provided at a sub-monthly, 1 degree resolution dating back to the early twentieth century. The principal source of data used in the construction of the gridded dataset is the International Comprehensive Ocean-Atmosphere Dataset (ICOADS, https://icoads.noaa.gov/), which provides SST observations from a combination of moving and fixed platforms (ships and buoys). The ship data have undergone a new processing procedure, with improved Quality Control (QC) flags, duplicate detection, and improved identification of mis-positioning and mis-dating of observations in some of the data sources. Ongoing work includes improvements in bias estimates by platform and country for the SST measurements. 
Gridded fields have been constructed using modelled ellipses to describe the spatial scales. It provides a unique opportunity to analyse the SST patterns in terms of their variability, spatial extent and persistence, at sub-monthly scales. 

Biography: I work at the National Oceanography Centre in Southampton. My work focuses on historical marine observations, mainly SST and air temperature, and the process of generating in-filled datasets from scattered in-situ data. I am interested in looking at SST datasets and extent of information they can capture. I have previously worked at University of Reading, where I completed my PhD, with both projects using satellite data for industrial thermal plume detection (PhD) and improving cloud cover in coastal regions (post-doc).