A remote sensing derived upper ocean heat content dataset for the equatorial atlantic: comparison with pirata project data

Abstract

In this work, nine years (1998-2006) of Sea Level Anomalies (SLA) from multimission altimeter data distributed by Archiving Validation and Interpretation of Satellite Data in Oceanography (AVISO) were combined with Sea Surface Temperature (SST) data from the TRMM Microwave Imager and climatological subsurface data from World Ocean Atlas 2001 (VVOA01) through a reduced gravity model, as well as a statistical model, to generate maps of Upper Layer Heat content (ULH) for the Equatorial Atlantic. In order to validate the ULH estimates, we perform a comparison with an independent in situ data from Prediction and Research Moored Array in the Tropical Atlantic (PIRATA). There is a very good match between the ULH anomalies derived from remote sensing and from PIRATA moorings. The best correlations are for the northwest Equatorial Atlantic PIRATA buoys, while the worst correlations are for the southeastern Equatorial Atlantic sites. We believe that using the most recent World Ocean Atlas 2009 (WOA09), which already incorporates the PIRATA dataset, could further improve the present method.