Sea Surface Temperature Intercomparison in the Framework of the Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S)

A joint effort between the Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) and the Group for High Resolution Sea Surface Temperature (GHRSST) has been dedicated to an intercomparison study of eight global gap-free sea surface temperature (SST) products to assess their accurate representation of the SST relevant to climate analysis. In general, all SST products show consistent spatial patterns and temporal variability during the overlapping time period (2003-18). The main differences between each product are located in the western boundary current and Antarctic Circumpolar Current regions. Linear trends display consistent SST spatial patterns among all products and exhibit a strong warming trend from 2012 to 2018 with the Pacific Ocean basin as the main contributor. The SST discrepancy between all SST products is very small compared to the significant warming trend. Spatial power spectral density shows that the interpolation into 1 degrees spatial resolution has negligible impacts on our results. The global mean SST time series reveals larger differences among all SST products during the early period of the satellite era (1982-2002) when there were fewer observations, indicating that the observation frequency is the main constraint of the SST climatology. The maturity matrix scores, which present the maturity of each product in terms of documentation, storage, and dissemination but not the scientific quality, demonstrate that ESA-CCI and OSTIA SST are well documented for users' convenience. Improvements could be made for MGDSST and BoM SST. Finally, we have recommended that these SST products can be used for fundamental climate applications and climate studies (e.g., El Nino).

Automated summary

The study compared eight global sea surface temperature (SST) products and found consistent spatial patterns with main differences in specific regions. Linear trends showed a significant warming trend in global SST from 2012 to 2018, with the Pacific Ocean basin being the main contributor.