Abstract
Using a thermography camera suspended from a vessel-towed balloon, low-altitude remote sensing measurement was conducted to map sea surface temperature around a coastal front. The balloon staying at around200-m altitude, was towed with a string from a research vessel, taking infrared images of the sea surface. To obtain accurate coastal front position and temperature data, the images were converted into those on the ground（Cartesian）coordinates. A wireless motion sensor was attached to the camera to measure pitch and roll angles in the course of the survey. In addition, azimuthal angles were calculated using the positions of two GPS buoys deployed around the coastal front. Thus, the above angles were used for the georeferencing adapted
to infrared images. Nonetheless, an artificial ellipsoidal pattern was superimposed on temperature maps because of the distortion of the lens. Therefore, the spatial anomaly of sea surface temperature was extracted from the measured images by fitting an ellipsoid in the temperature distribution in a least square sense.
