A Novel Approach for the High-Resolution Interpolation of In Situ Sea Surface Salinity

Abstract

Abstract A novel technique for the high-resolution interpolation of in situ sea surface salinity (SSS) observations is developed and tested. The method is based on an optimal interpolation (OI) algorithm that includes satellite sea surface temperature (SST) in the covariance estimation. The covariance function parameters (i.e., spatial, temporal, and thermal decorrelation scales) and the noise-to-signal ratio are determined empirically, by minimizing the root-mean-square error and mean error with respect to fully independent validation datasets. Both in situ observations and simulated data extracted from a numerical model output are used to run these tests. Different filters are applied to sea surface temperature data in order to remove the large-scale variability associated with air–sea interaction, because a high correlation between SST and SSS is expected only at small scales. In the tests performed on in situ observations, the lowest errors are obtained by selecting covariance decorrelation scales of 400 km, 6 days, and 2.75°C, respectively, a noise-to-signal ratio of 0.01 and filtering the scales longer than 1000 km in the SST time series. This results in a root-mean-square error of ~0.11 g kg−1 and a mean error of ~0.01 g kg−1, that is, reducing the errors by ~25% and ~60%, respectively, with respect to the first guess.