A reprocessing for climate of sea surface temperature from the along-track scanning radiometers: Initial validation, accounting for skin and diurnal variability effects

► New satellite sea surface temperature estimates compared with in situ observations. ► Radiometric SST directly seen from space is adjusted to SST at 20 cm depth. ► Comparison with drifting buoys shows small biases of order hundredths of °C. ► Diurnal variability is removed from climate signal. ► Regional biases in new satellite SSTs are shown to be generally < 0.1 K.