A0174
Title: Spatiotemporal comparison of sea surface to air temperatures in the tropical Pacific
Authors: Peter Craigmile - Hunter College, CUNY (United States) [presenting]
Peter Guttorp - Norwegian Computing Center (United States)
Abstract: In the study of global climate, ocean temperature estimates use sea surface temperature (SST) anomalies instead of marine atmospheric temperature (MAT) anomalies. A key question is to ask what biases result from this choice. Since SST and MAT are expected to have different correlation lengths, with SST being longer due to the slow change in ocean temperatures, it is statistically difficult to compare the two. Hierarchical statistical models are employed to investigate spatial-temporal differences between SST and MAT anomalies in the tropical Pacific. The analysis uses observations from the Tropical Atmosphere Ocean (TAO) buoy network. A spatiospectral modeling approach is used to account for missing data and quality issues in the observation network and allow for full uncertainty quantification.
