Abstract
In this study, we evaluated a new SMOS (Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity) soil moisture (SM) product, developed by the collaboration of INRA (Institut National de la Recherche Agronomique) and CESBIO (Centre d'Etudes Spatiales de la BIOsphere), against the operational SMOS level 3 SM product (SMOSL3). This new product (hereinafter referred to as SMOS-INRA-CESBIO, i.e. SMOSIC in short) differs from SMOSL3 three ways: (i) the SMOSIC algorithm considers the pixel as homogeneous and does not take into account the heterogeneity of the pixel; (ii) uses a new calibration of the effective scattering albedo and soil roughness parameters; (iii) no time correlation is applied on the optical depth. The evaluation was done over North America using the (European Center for Medium range Weather Forecasting) ECMWF SM simulation as a reference, using data for 2011. A better performance of the SMOSIC SM product with respect to ECMWF was found: (i) SMOSIC had higher correlation coefficients (temporal dynamics) and lower unbiased RMSD (absolute values) values with ECMWF over most of the study area and (ii) the spatial patterns of the SMOSIC temporal mean SM maps were in a better agreement with ECMWF.
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