Improved BEC SMOS Arctic Sea Surface Salinity product v3.1

Abstract

Measuring salinity from space is challenging since the sensitivity of the brightness temperature (TB) to sea surface salinity (SSS) is low (about 0.5ĝ€¯Kĝ€¯psu-1), while the SSS range in the open ocean is narrow (about 5ĝ€¯psu, if river discharge areas are not considered). This translates into a high accuracy requirement of the radiometer (about 2-3ĝ€¯K). Moreover, the sensitivity of the TB to SSS at cold waters is even lower (0.3Kpsu-1), making the retrieval of the SSS in the cold waters even more challenging. Due to this limitation, the ESA launched a specific initiative in 2019, the Arctic+Salinity project (AO/1-9158/18/I-BG), to produce an enhanced Arctic SSS product with better quality and resolution than the available products. This paper presents the methodologies used to produce the new enhanced Arctic SMOS SSS product . The product consists of 9ĝ€¯d averaged maps in an EASE 2.0 grid of 25ĝ€¯km. The product is freely distributed from the Barcelona Expert Center (BEC, http://bec.icm.csic.es/, last access: 25 January 2022) with the DOI number 10.20350/digitalCSIC/12620 . The major change in this new product is its improvement of the effective spatial resolution that permits better monitoring of the mesoscale structures (larger than 50ĝ€¯km), which benefits the river discharge monitoring.