Meetings: Documents

Comparison Analysis Between Aquarius Sea Surface Salinity and World Ocean Database In Situ Analyzed Sea Surface Salinity
[12-Nov-2014] Reagan, J., Boyer, T., Antonov, J., and Zweng, M.
Presented at the 2014 Aquarius/SAC-D Science Team Meeting
A new monthly sea surface salinity (SSS) product calculated from profile data within the World Ocean Database (WOD) is compared and contrasted with Aquarius SSS, both standard and Combined Active-Passive (CAP) products, from September 2011 through September 2013. The comparison examination first compares the new WOD SSS product to Argo-only gridded data where we find reasonable agreement between the two. Next, the gridded WOD SSS monthly fields are compared to the Aquarius fields where zonal and regional biases are found and discussed. In addition to a direct comparison, we also examine the differences in annual cycles between WOD SSS and Aquarius. Furthermore, we examine differences in interannual changes seen by the WOD product and the Aquarius products. Finally, we show that utilizing supplementary hydrographic data (in addition to Argo profiling floats), like that from CTDs, is extremely important in validating Aquarius in regions where little to no Argo data exists (i.e., high latitudes). It is also shown that in some regions data from these supplementary sources are the only reliable SSS measurements we have.