Improvements on Calibration and Image Reconstruction of SMOS for Salinity Retrievals in Coastal Regions

Abstract

Estimating sea surface salinity by European Space Agency's soil moisture and ocean salinity (SMOS) mission in coastal regions is still a challenging task. The brightness temperature measured by the SMOS interferometric radiometer is biased at coastal areas by the presence of land–sea contamination and other variable sources of error, mainly human-induced radio frequency interferences (RFI). In this paper, we will discuss on the benefits for retrieving salinity maps in coastal regions of applying two correction techniques that enhance the quality of brightness temperatures: the correction of residual multiplicative errors at calibration level (for the mitigation of systematic biases close to landmasses) and the nodal sampling at imaging level (for the reduction of Gibbs-like contamination). The joint application of both techniques leads to significant improvements in salinity retrievals not only in open ocean, but also in strongly contaminated coastal regions. Comparisons of SMOS salinity observations with in situ measurements show that biases of salinity differences are lower and standard deviations are significantly reduced with respect to those obtained from the current SMOS brightness temperatures.