Editorial for the Special Issue: “Ten Years of Remote Sensing at Barcelona Expert Center”

Abstract

This book celebrates the ten year anniversary of the Barcelona Expert Center by presenting recent contributions related to the topics on which the team has been working during those years. The Barcelona Expert Center’s expertise covers a wide variety of remote sensing fields, but the main focus of the research is on the SMOS data processing and its ocean, land, and ice applications. This book contains 14 scientific papers addressing topics that go from the description of the new data processing algorithms that are implemented in the last version of the operational SMOS level 1 processor to scientific applications derived from SMOS: results on the sea-surface salinity assimilation in coastal models, synergies of the sea-surface salinity with temperature and chlorophyll and their impact on the better retrieval of ocean surface currents, quality assessment of SMOS-derived sea ice thickness, sea-surface salinity, and soil moisture products, among others. Moreover, one of the papers verifies the potential of the future Copernicus Imaging Microwave Radiometer (CIMR) mission within the CMEMS sea-surface salinity (SSS) operational production after the SMOS era