SMOS' brightness temperatures validation: First results after the commissioning phase

Abstract

Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity (SMOS) mission is the second of European Space Agency's (ESA) Living Planet Programme Earth Explorer Opportunity Missions. SMOS's objective is to provide global and frequent Soil Moisture and Sea Surface Salinity maps. The single payload embarked on SMOS is the Microwave Imaging Radiometer by Aperture Synthesis (MIRAS), it is a 2D interferometric radiometer operating at the protected L-band with a nominal frequency of 1413.5 MHz. Since SMOS is the first 2D interferometric radiometers put in orbit so far, the characterization of the interferometrically measured brightness temperatures is an attractive topic for the scientific community. This study is focused on the estimation of the systematic antenna-based pattern in the measured brightness temperatures. Two improvements to the currently used method (Ocean Target Transformation) are proposed: 1) The elimination of the use of any forward model in the estimation of the bias. 2) The homogenization of the geophysical parameters distribution within the SMOS Field of View. Ocean Target Transformation is introduced in section 2, the proposed model-free methodology is described in section 3, while the effect of homogenizing the geophysical parameters distribution inside the FOV is assessed in section 4. The main conclusions are presented in section 5