Derivation of sea surface current field from sequential satellite images of the East China Sea

A series of NOAA AVHRR data over the East China Sea were collected from the ground station of the Second Institute of Oceanography, Hangzhou, China. Three methods, including a functional analytic method (FAM), a maximum cross correlation (MCC)'method and a correlation relaxation (C - R) method, are applied to derive the sea surface current field from sequential satellite images in the area of the East China Sea. Several preprocessing steps, such as geometric correction, SST determination, image projection, image navigation and grey value normalization as well as land and cloud mask are performed. The results from the three methods reflect the general current system in this area reasonably.