The PI has recently published the "Global Ocean Surface Temperature Atlas" (GOSTA) in conjunction with colleagues in the U.K. Met. Office, which includes a compilation of sea surface temperature (SST) anomalies from January 1856 to December 1989 (where available). He proposes to check the corrections applied to bucket temperatures before 1940, with help from the Woods Hole Sea Educational Association Students who presently have buckets from the Met Office Museum at sea. This will help to estimate potential errors when the data set is used to estimate long term temperature changes. GOSTA data will be used together with surface energy fluxes from the Consolidated Ocean Atmosphere Data Set (COADS) and microwave sounding unit (MSU) data on free air temperature to study the mechanisms of sea-air interaction and climatic fluctuations. Example of such studies include: the space-time structure of sea surface temperature fields, air temperature fields and surface flux fields; the correlations between these fields and between the fields and regional SST values; the association between latent heat flux variations and air temperature changes; estimation of the fraction of variance of marine air temperature changes attributable to atmospheric turbidity changes, Southern Oscillation Index changes and other changes involving atmospheric circulations; the relative importance of cloudiness changes, wind speed changes, sensible heat loss and latent heat loss in procuring SST anomalies. The research is important because it should add to our understanding of climate processes important to climate change and to our information base required to detect climate change.
