Abstract
A tool to process the SMOS microwave radiometer level 1C polarized brightness temperatures data product has been developed. The SMOS L1C science product contains the dual and full (Stokes vector) polarization brightness temperatures at L-band for multiple incidence angles. In order to use the L1C product, the measurements are processed by a number of procedures including radio frequency interference (RFI) filters, conversion of the polarization plane from the antenna (X- & Y-pol) to the Earth’s surface frame (H- & V-pol), and averaging to fixed classes of incidence angles. The software allows for the processing of data for the entire daily half-orbit product, or for specific regions of interest, and can be adapted as a bash-job to process a large number of data files e.g. for time series analysis. This paper describes the tool which was developed in GNU C++ with the capability to be compiled as MEX function to work with Octave or MATLAB® without any source code adjustment. Funding statement: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft DFG under grant number SI 606/24-1.
Highlights
This paper describes the tool which was developed in GNU C++ with the capability to be compiled as MEX function to work with Octave or MATLAB® without any source code adjustment
In order to use Soil Moisture Ocean Salinity (SMOS) measurements in further studies for soil moisture or ocean salinity retrievals and for data assimilation, the L1C brightness temperature needs to be transformed from the antenna reference frame (XY) into the Earth’s surface reference frame (HV polarization, hereafter)
We developed the “Process_SMOSxL1C” mexfunction as an alternative tool for rapid reading and processing of SMOS L1C data products with Matlab® [9] or GNU/Octave [4] programming languages
Summary
A tool to process the SMOS microwave radiometer level 1C polarized brightness temperatures data product has been developed. In order to use SMOS measurements in further studies for soil moisture or ocean salinity retrievals and for data assimilation, the L1C brightness temperature needs to be transformed from the antenna reference frame (XY) into the Earth’s surface reference frame (HV polarization, hereafter). This in done by considering the amount of rotation suffered by the polarization plane due to geometric and Faraday rotation. SMAP has an antenna configuration different from SMOS, and SMAP’s L1C data products (36 km resolution) are delivered with the Earth’s polarization reference frame, i.e. no further processing is needed For this validation exercise the region corresponding to the Neckar catchment has been selected. Observations by SMOS and SMAP from April to December 2015 have been taken into account when both satellites have a morning
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