The Tropical Ocean and Global Atmosphere-Tropical Atmosphere Ocean (TOGA-TAO) array of moored buoys is a real-time ocean-observing system which measures wind and upper ocean temperature and currents in the equatorial Pacific Ocean. The mean square error for TOGA-TAO sea surface temperature (SST) due to spatial sampling of 1500 km zonally and 200 km meridionally is expressed as the frequency-wavenumber integral of a sampling design dependent filter multiplied by the space-time spectral density of the SST field. Ten years of NOAA advanced very high resolution radiometer SST data, on a 1¿ by 1¿ by 1-day grid, were used to obtain space-time statistics. The zonal correlation length decreases with latitude. The zonal correlation length is 2000 km at the equator and 1500 km at 4¿N. The temporal correlations are 90 days at all latitudes from 0¿N to 5¿N. The frequency-wavenumber spectrum decreases as the inverse square of the wavenumber in the low-wavenumber domain and as the inverse cube of the frequency in the low-frequency domain. By using the sampling error formalism and the frequency-wavenumber spectrum obtained from satellite-derived SST, the sampling errors of the area- and time-averaged SST over the averaging box of 15¿ zonally by 2¿ meridionally by 1 month were found to be about 12% of the variance of the area-averaged SST for the TOGA-TAO array spacing. ¿ American Geophysical Union 1994