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SST-Sea
Temperature
Infrared
Infrared SST
The Satellite Eye project has installed an infrared radiometer on-board
the Galathea. The instrument measures the thermal infrared radiation
from the sea surface and this radiation is converted to a temperature.
Penetration depth
The infrared and microwave radiation penetrate less than 1 millimetre
into sea water, and therefore the radiation measured by the satellite
instruments represents the temperature of only the very surface. The
temperature measured through the radiation temperature is also often
referred to as the sea surface skin temperature because it represents
just the skin of the surface. This means that the radiation temperature
of the sea surface is not equal to the bulk sea surface temperature but
slightly lower. During daytime the temperature difference can be up to
0.5C but during night time the difference typically drops to 0.2C or
even lower. Physically speaking the radiation temperature and the bulk
temperature have different properties but from a practical point of
view they have much in common. This has lead to the construction of
various algorithms from which the bulk sea surface temperature can be
derived from the radiation temperature.
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