INTRODUCTION OF J-OFURO LATENT HEAT FLUX VERSION 2

Japanese Ocean Flux Data Sets with Use of Remote Sensing Observations (J-OFURO) includes global ocean surface heat flux data derived from satellite data and are used in many studies related to air-sea interaction. Recently latent heat flux data version 2 was constructed in J-OFURO. In version 2 many points are improved compared with version 1. A bulk algorithm used for estimation of latent heat flux is changed from Kondo (1975) to COASRE 3.0(Fairall et al., 2005). In version 1 we used NCEP reanalysis data (Reynolds and Smith, 1994) as SST data. However, the temporal resolution of the data is weekly and considerably low. Recently there are many kinds of global SST data because we can obtain SST data using a microwave radiometer sensor such as TRMM/MI and Aqua/AMSR-E. Therefore, we compared many SST products and determined to use Merged satellite and in situ data Global Daily (MGD) SST provided by Japan Meteorological Agency. Since we use wind speed and specific humidity data derived from one DMSP/SSMI sensor in J-OFURO, we obtain two data at most one day. Therefore, there may be large sampling errors for the daily-mean value. In order to escape this problem, multi-satellite data are used in version 2. As a result we could improve temporal resolution from 3-days mean value in version 1 to daily-mean value in version 2. Also we used an Optimum Interpolation method to estimate wind speed and specific humidity data instead of a simple mean method. Finally the data period is extended to 1989-2004. In this presentation we will introduce latent heat flux data version 2 in J-OFURO and comparison results with other surface latent heat flux data such as GSSTF2 and HOAPS etc. Moreover, we will present validation results by using buoy data.