Support for Blended SST Legacy Migration

(NOAA Collaborators:Eileen Maturi)

NOAA’s increasingly popular Geo-Polar Blended SST analysis is proving to be a very high quality product, making full use of the latest geostationary and polar-orbiter data at maximum resolution.  It underpins the NOAA Coral Reef Monitoring suite of products, and the Ocean Heat Content product used by the NHC.  The UK Met Office OSTIA analysis has been used as the bias correction reference for the numerous satellite data sources going into the analysis.  The bias correction methodology for the Geo-Polar Blended Analysis is in the process of being overhauled, removing the dependence on OSTIA.  Along with high-quality SST observations from the VIIRS instruments on S-NPP and now NOAA-20, 1-km resolution SST data are being assimilated from the venerable AVHRR instruments carried on the Eumetsat MetOp platforms, and SST observations from five geostationary platforms: GOES-16 & 17, Meteosat-11 & 8, and Himawari-8, while passive microwave SST observations from GCOM-W1 AMSR-2 will also be included soon.  In order to ensure maintainability, improve portability, and facilitate more straightforward development, the code will be ported from the original development environment (Matlab) to the widely-used Python language.  We will also take the opportunity to overhaul the design to eliminate some idiosyncrasies and improve development efficiency.