The Current Configuration of the OSTIA System for Operational Production of Foundation Sea Surface Temperature and Ice Concentration Analyses

Abstract

The Operational Sea Surface Temperature and Sea Ice Analysis (OSTIA) system generates global, daily, gap-filled foundation sea surface temperature (SST) fields from satellite data and in situ observations. The SSTs have uncertainty information provided with them and an ice concentration (IC) analysis is also produced. Additionally, a global, hourly diurnal skin SST product is output each day. The system is run in near real time to produce data for use in applications such as numerical weather prediction. Data production is monitored routinely and outputs are available from the Copernicus Marine Environment Monitoring Service (CMEMS; marine.copernicus.eu). As an operational product, the OSTIA system is continuously under development. For example, since the original descriptor paper was published, the underlying data assimilation scheme that is used to generate the foundation SST analyses has been updated. Various publications have described these changes but a full description is not available in a single place. This technical note focuses on the production of the foundation SST and IC analyses by OSTIA and aims to provide a comprehensive description of the current system configuration.