Effects of GSICS correction on estimation of sea surface temperature using COMS data

A main objective of the Global Space-Based Inter-Calibration System (GSICS) is to ensure consistent accuracy of thermal infrared (IR) channels of satellite measurements. In this article, IR channels observed by the Communication, Ocean, and Meteorological Satellite (COMS) were corrected using observations by the Infrared Atmospheric Sounding Interferometer (IASI) on board Meteorological Operation (MetOp) satellites as a reference. We then produced sea surface temperature (SST) products using GSICS-corrected COMS/Meteorological Imager (MI) IR data and evaluated the accuracies of the SST data by comparing with buoy data. Our results showed that SST produced from GSICS-corrected IR data was more accurate than that from original IR data, with a difference of 0.01–0.2ºC. Differences in SST between the original and GSICS-corrected IR showed a linear proportional relationship around IR₂ (12.0 μm) during the day and IR₁ (10.8 μm) at night. In the IR₁ analysis, accuracies of daytime SST were improved significantly when the GSICS correction was applied to COMS IR data; also, the mean and median values of SST discrepancies (between the original and GSICS-corrected IR) according to changes in brightness temperature difference (BTD) were close to 0ºC. We found that the accuracies of SST estimation from satellite IR bands were greatly improved by applying the GSICS correction.