Thursday 29 March 2012

Ocean temperature angel?

As part of the SST CCI, Steinar Eastwood has been scrutinizing a lot of high latitude images to create a data base of observations classified into clear-sky-ocean, clear-sky-ice, cloud, cloud-shadow-over-ice, etc. This will be used to improve the classification step for ice areas, so that, for example, an "SST" is not inadvertently obtained for a location with significant ice (which may be a very different temperature). In the course of this painstaking work, Steinar was startled to see, in the pattern of warm and cold ocean surface temperatures, a figure with wings and a halo, playing a trumpet ...

The image shows in false colour the Greenland coast (bottom), and area of low cloud (appearing red) and, in the top portion of the image, the variations in sea surface temperature encoded as different brightnesses.