An unprecedented view of ocean currents from geostationary satellites

Abstract Accurate knowledge of ocean surface currents is essential for forecasting weather and climate, marine ecosystems, and navigation at sea. Traditional approaches are limited to point measurements, typically from ships, or snapshots in time from space. Here we introduce Geostationary Ocean Flow (GOFLOW), a novel product that employs existing high spatio-temporal resolution broad banded geostationary satellite data of the sea surface temperature together with machine learning techniques trained on state of the art ocean models, to provide hourly ocean surface velocities from spatial scales of kilometers to entire basin scales. Compared with existing operational ocean products (AVISO) and state of the art satellites (SWOT), GOFLOW provides {unparalleled} temporal and spatial velocity resolution over a wide range of space and time scales without the need to assume geostrophic balance. With the potential to be utilized in all ocean basins, GOFLOW represents a notable advancement towards global high-resolution, spatio-temporal observations of ocean currents. This information should substantially improve ocean and atmosphere models.