High Resolution and High Frequency Sea Surface Temperature Measurements from the Forest-Constellation

Sea Surface Temperature (SST) is a key variable for understanding oceanographic processes and climate dynamics, and monitoring maritime environments and marine ecosystem management operations. The Forest constellation of CubeSats provides an innovative source to SST measurement by leveraging thermal infrared sensors with a spatial resolution of 200 meters and a swath width of 410 km. From April 25 onwards, the constellation achieves a revisit time of 12 hours anywhere on Earth, enabling near real-time monitoring of ocean thermal patterns. Designed with a radiometric accuracy target of 3K, the system is optimized for capturing fine-scale thermal structures with reliability comparable to traditional satellite platforms. Overpass times of the Forest constellation will be around late afternoon local time. This offers two advantages for SST data analysis. First, many public satellites have overpass times around midday and the afternoon orbits suffer from a coverage gap. Therefore, the Forest constellation will close a significant data gap in the afternoon. Second, the late afternoon overpasses align with the peak diurnal warming of ocean temperatures. As maximum temperatures are often the primary variables of interest when analyzing ecosystem effects, the afternoon orbits may offer special insights for this. At EGU, we want to showcase examples of our SST data from Forest 2, the current generation in orbit. We outline the methodology for processing, calibrating, and validating SST measurements derived from the Forest constellation. We evaluate the data quality and its potential applications in areas such as ocean circulation modeling, marine resource management, maritime sustainability and climate change monitoring. Preliminary results highlight the ability of the Forest constellation to deliver high-resolution SST data at high revisit rates, offering a cost-effective and accessible solution for global ocean observation. This adds to demonstrate the transformative potential of CubeSat technology in advancing Earth system science.