Simulation study of multispectral estimation of sea-surface temperature from Infrared observations

A general multispectral analysis technique is described to estimate sea-surface temperature (SST) using data from the High-Resolution Infrared Radiation Sounder (HIRS) on board the TIROS-N/NOAA-6 series of weather satellites. Our study, based on infrared radiative transfer simulations, shows that the radiometric observations for spectral channels at 11.1, 8.3, 13.4, and 4.57 μm are sufficient to provide SST values to a high degree of accuracy. These multispectral calculations automatically incorporate corrections due to the variations in atmospheric water vapor and temperature.