A two-channel method for retrieval of the Black Sea surface temperature from Landsat-8 measurements

Abstract

The present work is devoted to the development of a retrieval algorithm for the sea surface temperature from the two-channel measurements of the Landsat-8 satellite on the basis of a comparison with MODIS satellite data. The algorithm makes it possible to reconstruct the surface temperature with a 100 m resolution, which enables analysis of the spatial structure of various phenomena on the ocean surface at small scales (upwelling, submesoscale vortices, etc.). The magnitude of the standard deviation between the reconstructed temperature and the temperature derived from the MODIS satellite is ~0.58°C. The sources of inconsistency between temperatures retrieved from the MODIS and Landsat-8 measurements were investigated: diurnal temperature variation, which leads to an increase in the standard deviation in the summer period because of the mismatch in time (~2 hours) between measurements; the presence of specific bands in the Landsat data, which is probably related to instrumental errors of the device.