The ESA Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity (SMOS) mission aims at providing, over the oceans, Sea Surface Salinity (SSS) maps with spatial and temporal coverage adequate for large scale oceanography. The MIRAS payload provides the brightness temperature measurements (TB, Level 1 data) to be ingested in the inversion scheme to retrieve SSS in a single satellite overpass (Level 2 product). Besides, in order to reduce measurements’ noise, spatio-temporal averaging of the retrieved L2 SSS has to be properly performed (Level 3 product) to meet the challenging mission requirements. At high geographical latitudes Sea Surface Temperature (SST) is generally low and it is known that the TB sensitivity to SSS decreases at colder SSTs. Conversely, at those latitudes, an improvement in the Level 3 retrieved SSS performances should be expected, due to the increased sampling of pixels at the same longitude in successive latitudes. In this study, an extension of previous work on this topic has been performed, in various retrieval configurations and settings, once a tight data filtering strategy is applied. Quantitative rate of changes with the SST variability are provided together with the net oversampling contribution to the L3 SSS accuracy

2012 IEEE GOLD Remote Sensing Conference, 4-5 June 2012, Roma, Italy.-- 3 pages, 4 figures, 1 table

Peer Reviewed