CERSAT

Products and Services

Medspiration project has initiated the development of many innovative products and services. Most of these products have been endorsed by agencies or operational services which have taken over their daily sustained production but some of the high resolution regional maps of SST are still produced in the context of Medspiration.

Products

Current product line

Regional cloud-free daily maps at high resolution (refered as Level 4 or L4 products) over some predefined geographic areas are routinely produced by Medspiration. Optimal interpolation (OI) techniques are used to combine coincident measures of SST under satellite track (Level 2P or L2P products) from different types of sensor and to fill gaps where no observations are available. Whereas L2P data essentially represent the skin or sub-skin SST, the L4 SST product is defined to represent the foundation SST (SSTfnd) and is updated only once every 24 hr.

The areas currently adressed by Medspiration include :

  • Mediterranean sea
  • Brazil
  • South-Africa
  • Great-Barrier Reef, Australia

 

Former products

The acknowledgement of Medspiration products quality and good practices have permitted that SST data producers now delivers natively their data according to Medspiration specifications. Therefore several Medspiration products have become redundant since being now taken over by other agencies or frameworks : the production of these products has then been stopped and users have been invited to switch to the new respective sources.

Services

Match-up database

Available in situ measurements of SST will be matched with coincident samples within the L2P SST data, in order to prepare records for delivery to the GHRSST-PP MDB. This is required by GHRSST-PP to determine the SSES needed when assigning quality values for the L2P data. The geographical scope of the MDB records to be delivered is the same European area as defined for the L2P products.

Quality assessment

Overall quality of products is controlled over time by comparing with in situ data (drifting buoys).

High-Resolution Diagnostic Datasets

Entries to the GHRSST-PP high resolution diagnostic data set (GHRSST HR-DDS) will be compiled by extracting, and resampling onto a 0.01° grid, full resolution sub scenes for a set of predefined small areas (typically 2° x 2°) from every L2P SST and L4 dataset generated by the Medspiration processor. The HR-DDS sites are defined by GHRSST-PP. The purpose of the HR-DDS is to allow intercomparison of the characteristics of the SST derived from different sensor types, in order to facilitate the research needed to test and improve the data merging methods used in GHRSST-PP.