Overview of the Baltic Sea and North Sea SST activities for the Copernicus Marine Service at DMI

Short abstract  

The Danish Meteorological Institute serves as a Production Unit (PU) for the Sea Surface Temperature (SST) Thematic Assembly Center (TAC) of the Copernicus Marine Monitoring Service. Within this framework, a suite of L3 and L4 SST products for the Baltic and North Sea are produced daily and as multi-year products. Having entered a new phase of the project in 2022, a range of activities are planned for the next three years, from releases of new products to improvements on existing ones.

An example of a new product is the hourly L4 SST resolving the diurnal cycle in the North and Baltic Seas, currently under development. It is based on single-sensor satellite SST, aggregated hourly and optimally interpolated to generate gap-free hourly fields. Upon release, the product will allow monitoring of the daily SST variability, especially relevant for algal blooms and marine heatwaves.

An improvement of the existing daily L4 SST product is related with its associated uncertainties as analysis showed them to be higher than those observed from comparisons with drifting and moored buoy in situ sensors.

The aim of this presentation is to provide an overview of the existing SST products and their quality, along with a summary of the improvements planned for the ongoing Copernicus Marine Service phase, especially those to be implemented by the end of 2022; preliminary results for the generation and validation of the new L4 diurnal SST product and the validation of modelled uncertainties of the daily L4 SST for the North/Baltic Seas will be presented.