Horizontal and vertical sea surface salinity variability in South China sea area

With the perspective of discriminating some regions particularly suited or unsuited to sea surface salinity retrieval studies by satellite data, the horizontal and vertical Sea surface salinity variability for different time scale is calculated in South China Sea area from 2005 to 2014. It gives a variability with less than 0.1psu in most areas in space resolution of 1°×1° for short time scales. But for monthly averaged SSS, the variability exceeds 0.2psu in some areas in south of South China Sea. The result indicates that the averaged salinity within 1°×1° box for different time scales can be used to matchup satellite derived measurements in validation process but for monthly or longer averaged SSS data sets, the validation need to be carefully selected in some areas especially in south of South China Sea.