Reconstruction of the long-term satellite-derived sea surface temperature in the South China Sea

The AVHRR (Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer) sea surface temperature is very useful for researches in oceanography because of its high resolution. An AVHRR limitation is the high missing data percentage due to cloud coverage. In the South China Sea, the average missing data is usually more than 80%, especially more than 95% in the region near the Borneo Island. In this study, we use DINEOF tool to reconstruct a daily night-time AVHRR data set with horizontal resolution of 4km spanning from 1989 to 2009. Besides, a comparison between the results and in situ data is shown. The EOF analysis shows that the first three modes explain about 95% of seasonal variability.