Optically Enhanced Super-Resolution of Sea Surface Temperature Using Deep Learning

Sea surface temperature (SST) can be measured from space using infrared sensors on Earth-observing satellites. However, the tradeoff between spatial resolution and swath size (and hence revisit time) means that SST products derived from remote sensing measurements commonly only have a moderate resolution (>1 km). In this article, we adapt the design of a super-resolution neural network architecture [specifically very deep super-resolution (VDSR)] to enhance the resolution of both top-of-atmosphere thermal images of sea regions and bottom-of-atmosphere SST images by a factor of 5. When tested on an unseen dataset, the trained neural network yields thermal images that have an RMSE 2-3x smaller than interpolation, with a 6-9 dB improvement in PSNR. A major contribution of the proposed neural network architecture is that it fuses optical and thermal images to propagate the high-resolution information present in the optical image to the restored thermal image. To illustrate the potential benefits of using super-resolution (SR) in the context of oceanography, we present super-resolved SST images of a gyre and an ocean front, revealing details and features otherwise poorly resolved by moderate resolution satellite images.