Sea Surface Temperature（SST） is one of the important parameters of hydrodynamic and oceanographic research. It has been widely utilized in the study of climate change, weather forecasting, numerical weather prediction（NWP）, atmospheric and oceanographic applications, fisheries, and other sciences. This study compares SST derived from Wind Sat to those directly observed by NDBC/TAO buoy and SST provided by AMSR-E. In the collocation of Wind Sat and buoy data, an SST value with a rain rate larger than zero was rejected. Collocation adopted a ±30 min time constraint and 25 km maximum separation. A total of 82,247 Wind Sat-NDBC collocations and 366,693 WindSat-TAO collocations were acquired. Rsults show that Wind Sat SST has a mean bias of 0.10 °C and standard deviation of 0.59 °C in the coastal and offshore waters of the United States. In the tropical Pacific Ocean, Wind Sat SST has a mean bias of –0.15 °C and standard deviation of 0.33 °C. In addition, Wind Sat SST has an increasing warm bias or a decreasing cool bias in summer. The standard deviations of the satellite-derived SST are both relatively large in the US East Coast and in the Gulf of Mexico; the standard deviations of certain regions are higher than 1 °C. When the buoy wind speed ranges from 5 m/s to 10 m/s, the accuracy of Wind Sat SST is good, and the mean bias and standard deviation are relatively constant. When the buoy wind speed exceeds 12m/s, the uncertainty of Wind Sat SST increases. Global comparison with AMSR-E shows that Wind Sat monthly averaged SST is cooler than that of AMSR-Ein summer and warmer in winter. Even though it has operated beyond its designed life of seven years, Wind Sat SST continues to exhibit acceptable accuracy. Wind Sat retrieves SST better in tropical Pacific and worse in US coasts and in the Gulf of Mexico. The part of wind direction correction in retrieval algorithms needs to be improved to increase the accuracy of SST retrieval under conditions of high wind speed.

sea surface temperature;Wind Sat;NDBC buoy;TAO buoy;AMSR-E