An Overview of the SST Error Budget

An overview of the NASA/NOAA Sea Surface Temperature Science Team white paper on the SST Error Budget is provided. This is followed with a discussion of two methods to estimate the contribution resulting from instrument noise - one component of the error budget - to the error of level 2 SST fields. These methods are applied to SST fields produced from NOAA-15 AVHRR and Suomi-NPP VIIRS radiances. Finally, the consequences of the estimated pixel-to-pixel noise are examined in the context of the SST gradient.