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Since the beginning of its routine science operation in March 2015, the NASA SMAP observatory has been returning interference-mitigated brightness temperature observations at L-band (1.41 GHz) frequency from space. The resulting data enable frequent global mapping of soil moisture with a retrieval uncertainty below 0.040 m3/m3 at a 36 km spatial scale. This paper describes the development and validation...
This work is devoted to describe the new processing techniques that are being conceived, developed and implemented at the Barcelona Expert Centre (BEC) for the generation of sea surface salinity (SSS) maps from the Soil Mooisture and Ocean Salinity (SMOS) mission. Several algorithms to mitigate the ripples and sidelobes present in the SMOS brightness temperature (TB) images, to characterize the spatial...
This work is focused on the quality improvement of ESA's SMOS (Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity) salinity retrievals, paying special attention to coastal regions. Two correction techniques have been applied to enhance the quality of brightness temperatures: the nodal sampling for the reduction of Gibbs-like contamination and the correction of residual amplitude calibration errors for the mitigation...
The European Space Agency mission Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity (SMOS) is devoted, since its launch in 2009, to provide global soil moisture and sea surface salinity values. SMOS uses an L band 2-D interferometric radiometer by aperture synthesis to obtain polarimetric brightness temperature images. This work is devoted to compute the spatial correlations in the measured antenna brightness temperature...
Hyperspectral indices from the Compact Airborne Spectrographic Imager (CASI 550), together with land surface temperatures from the Thermal Airborne Spectrographic Imager (TASI 600) and brightness temperatures from a L-band radiometer were combined in a semi-empirical model to obtain soil moisture at very high spatial resolution (3.5 m). The airborne imagery was acquired in an experiment performed...
RFI (Radio Frequency Interference) sources, Sun signal and even land-sea transitions may generate large sidelobes that corrupt SMOS brightness temperature products and therefore, the quality of the soil moisture and sea surface salinity retrievals. This work focuses on the reduction of this Gibbs-like contamination in brightness temperature scenes using an alternative image reconstruction approach...
The Local Oscillators (LO) of the Microwave Imaging Radiometer using Aperture Synthesis (MIRAS) onboard the Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity (SMOS) satellite are used to maintain the operating frequency of the 69 receivers. The phase of the LO drifts over time, in turn blurring the MIRAS brightness temperature (TB) measurements. After a pre-launch assessment, it was decided to calibrate the LO every...
SMOS salinity inversion consists of minimizing the residual between measured and modeled brightness temperatures. The minimization procedure is a great challenge and crucial step, but its success depends on the quality of the forward model. Consequently, we present an empirical update of pre-launch L-band emissivity forward models, where the essential improvement is related to the emissivity by a...
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