High-Resolution Ocean Currents from Sea Surface Temperature Observations: The Catalan Sea (Western Mediterranean)

Special issue Observing the Flow of Ocean Currents and Circulation Using Remote Sensing.-- 14 pages, 9 figures, 1 table.-- Data Availability Statement: Infrared images are available through the Insitut de Ciències del Mar (CSIC) at https://coo.icm.csic.es/site-page/satellite-data (accessed on 9 Septembre 2021)Current observations of ocean currents are mainly based on altimetric measurements of Sea Surface Heights (SSH), however the characteristics of the present-day constellation of altimeters are only capable to retrieve surface currents at scales larger than 50–70 km. By contrast, infrared and visible radiometers reach spatial resolutions thirty times higher than altimeters under cloud-free conditions. During the last years, it has been shown how the Surface Quasi-Geostrophic (SQG) approximation is able to reconstruct surface currents from measured Sea Surface Temperature (SST), but it has not been yet used to retrieve velocities at scales shorter than those provided by altimeters. In this study, the velocity field of ocean structures with characteristic lengths between 10 and 20 km has been derived from infrared SST using the SQG approach and compared to the velocities derived from the trajectories of Lagrangian drifters. Results show that the SQG approach is able to reconstruct the direction of the velocity field with observed RMS errors between 8 and 15 degrees and linear correlations between 0.85 and 0.99. The reconstruction of the modulus of the velocity is more problematic due to two limitations of the SQG approach: the need to calibrate the level of energy and the ageostrophic contributions. If drifter trajectories are used to calibrate velocities and the analysis is restricted to small Rossby numbers, the RMS error in the range of 10 to 16 cm/s and linear correlations can be as high as 0.97This research has been funded by the European Space Agency through the GlobCurrent Data User Element project (4000109513/13/I-LG), and the CONECTA (CTM2014-54648-C2-1-R) and COSMO (CTM2016-79474-R) projects funded by the Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness, Spain, and FEDER EU through the National R + D Plan. E. Garcia-Ladona (ICM-CSIC) and A. Padial (SASEMAR) want to thanks the funding support of MED OSMoSIS (ref: 6119, INTEREG MED Program 6MED_4.1_SP_005) project regarding the data compilation of dummy and drifter tracks during regular SAR exercises. J. Isern-Fontanet wants to thanks the funding support of SHAREMD (ref: 6184, INTEREG MED Program 6MED_4.1_SP_006). Financial support by Fundación General CSIC (Programa ComFuturo) is also acknowledged. This work acknowledges the “Severo Ochoa Centre of Excellence” accreditation (CEX2019-000928-S)Peer reviewe