SMOS – Soil Moisture & Ocean Salinity
The SMOS remote sensing mission was launched on the 2. of November in 2009 is part of the opportunity missions of the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Earth Explorer program. The project office role was to inform the scientific community and the public about the current mission status as well as to promote the use of the SMOS data products within Germany. After the successful launch of the satellite and the commissioning phase (ended in May 2010) it is time for checking and optimizing the data. This is done in the frame of the German SMOS Cal/Val Project at the Institute of Oceanography (IfM) of the University of Hamburg by calibration and validation studies for the SMOS instrument. Furthermore, in pilot modelling studies these data will be assimilated.
The German Cal/Val Project project is funded by the German ministry of economy and technology (BMWI) via the German aerospace agency DLR (50 EE 09 34).
Global salinity in September 2010 (left) and March 2011( right).
Due to deficiencies of the models used to derive salinity from brightness temperature there are bias in the SMOS salinity. The latitudinal dependent bias and long term drift were corrected for by comparing SMOS data from each month to climatological salinity data (WOA09). Validation to ARGO salinity proved this method to be efficient.