Abstract
This article summarizes some of the activities in which Jordi Font, research professor and head of the Department of Physical and Technological Oceanography, Institut de Ciencies del Mar (CSIC, Spanish National Research Council) in Barcelona, has been involved as co-Principal Investigator for Ocean Salinity of the European Space Agency Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity (SMOS) Earth Explorer Mission from the perspective of the Remote Sensing Lab at the Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya. We have probably left out some of his many contributions to salinity remote sensing, but we hope that this review will give an idea of the importance of his work. We focus on the following issues: 1) the new accurate measurements of the sea water dielectric constant, 2) the WISE and EuroSTARRS field experiments that helped to define the geophysical model function relating brightness temperature to sea state, 3) the FROG 2003 field experiment that helped to understand the emission of sea foam, 4) GNSS-R techniques for improving sea surface salinity retrieval, 5) instrument characterization campaigns, and 6) the operational implementation of the Processing Centre of Levels 3 and 4 at the SMOS Barcelona Expert Centre.
Highlights
The Remote Sensing Laboratory of the Department of Signal Theory and Communications at the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya – BarcelonaTech, has been involved since 1993 in the technological aspects of the Microwave Imaging Radiometer with Aperture Synthesis (MIRAS), the single payload of the European Space Agency Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity (SMOS) Earth Explorer Opportunity mission
Summary: This article summarizes some of the activities in which Jordi Font, research professor and head of the Department of Physical and Technological Oceanography, Institut de Ciències del Mar (CSIC, Spanish National Research Council) in Barcelona, has been involved as co-Principal Investigator for Ocean Salinity of the European Space Agency Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity (SMOS) Earth Explorer Mission from the perspective of the Remote Sensing Lab at the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya
We focus on the following issues: 1) the new accurate measurements of the sea water dielectric constant, 2) the WISE and EuroSTARRS field experiments that helped to define the geophysical model function relating brightness temperature to sea state, 3) the FROG 2003 field experiment that helped to understand the emission of sea foam, 4) GNSS-R techniques for improving sea surface salinity retrieval, 5) instrument characterization campaigns, and 6) the operational implementation of the Processing Centre of Levels 3 and 4 at the SMOS Barcelona Expert Centre
Summary
Sea surface salinity (SSS) can be remotely measured using microwave radiometry at L-band (Swift et al 1983). Due to the low sensitivity of brightness temperature to SSS, 0.2-0.8 K/psu (psu = practical salinity unit, roughly 1 g of salt per 1 kg of water), the dependence on the physical temperature (Fig. 2), incidence angle, polarization, surface roughness (induced by local wind or by far waves), the technical difficulties of achieving a precise calibration and stability, and especially the presence of radio-frequency interference (RFI). In 1995, the ESA organized the Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity Workshop to define the roadmap to remotely measure these two geophysical variables, and it was concluded that the most promising technique was aperture synthesis radiometry, which had been successfully demonstrated a few years earlier with the ESTAR instrument (Ruf et al 1998). Opportunity Mission (Silvestrin et al 2001) within the ESA Living Planet Programme and was launched on 2 November 2009 from Plesetsk, Russia (Figs 4 and 5)
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