Assessment of Extreme Diurnal Warming in Operational Geosynchronous Satellite Sea Surface Temperature Products Remote Sensing

We evaluate the reliability and basic characteristics of observations of extreme DW events from current operational geostationary satellite sea surface temperature (SST) products through examination of three months of diurnal warming (DW) estimates derived by different methodologies from the Spinning Enhanced Visible and Infrared Imager on Meteosat-11, Advanced Himawari Imager on Himawari-8, and Advanced Baseline Imager on the Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite (GOES)-16. This work primarily focuses on the following research questions: (1) Can these operational SST products accurately characterize extreme DW events? (2) What are the amplitudes and frequencies of these events? To answer these, we compute distributions of DW and DW exceedance and compare them amongst the different methods and geostationary sensors. Examination of the DW estimates demonstrates several challenges in accurately deriving distributions of the DW amplitude, particularly associated with estimating the “foundation” temperature and uncertainties in cloud screening. Overall, the results suggest that current geostationary sensors can reliably assess extreme DW, but the estimates are sensitive to the computational methods applied. We thus suggest careful processing/screening of the SST retrievals. We find a value of 3 K, corresponding to the 99th percentile, provides a potential practical threshold for extreme warming, but events of at least 6 K were reliably observed. Warming in excess of 6 K occurred somewhere an average of 47% of the time, and its probability at a given location was of O(10−6).