Operational Procedure For Monitoring Remotely Sensed. Sea Surface Temperatures

ABSTRACT In Indonesia, there is now no operational sea surface temperature (SST) monitoring for such activities as oceanography, climatology or fishery. Indeed, until 1986 the Indonesian Institute of Aeronautics and Space (LAPAN) required NOAA data without atmospheric correction. It is even worse that local hardware constraints prevent any operational monitoring with mainframe cornputers. By analysing NOAA data with microcomputers, the methodology presented in this paper intends to fill this gap. It was tested with the study of large scale SST features in Indonesia from July 1981 to June 1985. Digital data were provided by digitizing 208 weekly SST charts\u27 of NOAA-NESSwith pixel size of 10151 longitude and latitude. These data displayed a 0.5°K rms error as compared with 1985 in-situ measurements. Iterative and interactive factorial analyses combined with "parallelepiped" classifier, acting as a clustering technique, enhanced the SST spatiotemporal features. The study area was divided into zones in which pixels had similar SST profiles, whereas dates of occurrence of thermal anomalies were pointed out. Sea fronts and upwellings were mapped through spatiotemporal analyses of therthal gradients. This study stresses the possibility of an operational SST monitoring in Indonesia, allowing simple data manipulation with a type of hardware equipment maintained locally and easily. Kata Kunci.: sea surface temperature - oceanography - Fisherie