Assimilating Retrievals of Sea Surface Temperature from VIIRS and AMSR2

Experiments are carried out to assess the potential contributions of two new satellite datasets, derived from the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) on board the Suomi-National Polar-Orbiting Partnership satellite and the Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer 2 (AMSR2) on board the Global Change Observation Mission-Water (GCOM-W) satellite, to the quality of global sea surface temperature (SST) analyses at the Canadian Meteorological Centre (CMC). The new datasets are assimilated both separately and together. Verification of the analyses against independent data shows that the VIIRS and AMSR2 datasets yield analyses with similar global average errors, with the VIIRS analysis performing better during some seasons and the AMSR2 analysis performing better in others. Seasonal cloudiness in some regions diminishes the availability of VIIRS retrievals, resulting in better performance by the AMSR2 analysis. Both datasets were assimilated together along with data from the Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer (AVHRR), ice data, and in situ data in an updated version of the CMC analysis produced on a 0.1 degree grid. Verification against independent data shows that the new analysis performed very well, with global average standard deviation consistently better than that of the international Group for High Resolution SST (GHRSST) Multiproduct Ensemble (GMPE) real-time system. This analysis is shown to outperform the currently operational CMC SST analysis, with most of the improvement being due to its assimilation of the VIIRS and AMSR2 retrievals and a further small gain being due to changes to the analysis methodology (including higher resolution).