Direct faraday rotation angle retrieval in SMOS field of view

Abstract

It has recently been demonstrated that boresight averaged Faraday rotation angle (FRA) can be retrieved directly from SMOS full-pol radiometric data. However, in order to extend FRA retrievals to the full Alias-Free Field of View (AF-FoV), SMOS relatively poor pixel radiometric sensitivity and accuracy must be compensated by spatial and temporal averaging. This requires some kind of tradeoff to constrain systematic FRA estimation bias both within SMOS AF-FoV and along the orbit. This work presents the first results given by a SMOS end-to-end FRA simulator, currently under development, that is used to trim and assess the performance of several FRA retrieval approaches