Investigation of rain effects on Aquarius Sea Surface Salinity measurements

Abstract

The Aquarius/SAC-D mission has been providing Sea Surface Salinity (SSS), globally over the ocean, for almost 3 years. As a member of the AQ/SAC-D Cal/Val team, the Central Florida Remote Sensing Laboratory has analyzed these salinity retrievals in the presence of rain and has noted the strong correlation between the spatial patterns of reduced SSS and the spatial distribution of rainfall. It was determined that this is the result of a cause and effect relationship, as opposed to SSS measurement errors. Hence, it is important to understand these SSS changes due to seawater dilution by rain and the associated near-surface salinity stratification. This paper addresses the effects of rainfall on the Aquarius (AQ) SSS retrieval using a macro-scale Rain Impact Model (RIM) in the region of high convective rain over the Inter-tropical Convergence Zone. This model, based on the superposition of a one-dimension eddy diffusion (turbulent diffusion) model, relates sea surface salinity to depth, rain accumulation and time since rainfall. For aiding in the identification of instantaneous and prior rainfall accumulations, an AQ Rain Accumulation product was developed. This product, based on the NOAA CMORPH rain data set, provides the rainfall history for 24 h prior to the observation time, which is integrated over each AQ SSS measurement cell. In this paper results of the RIM validation are presented by comparing AQ measured and RIM simulated SSS for several months of 2012. Results show the high cross correlation for these comparisons and also with the corresponding SSS anomalies relative to HYCOM.