SMOS L2 OS ATBD - ARGANS

VIII
ICM-CSIC
LOCEAN/SA/CETP
IFREMER
Semi-realistic retrievals:
SMOS L2 OS
Algorithm Theoretical
Baseline Document
Doc: SO-TN-ARG-GS-0007
Issue: 3 Rev: 9
Date: 25 January 2013
Page:A2- VIII
In order to look at the effects of biases over various oceanic conditions, we perform retrievals
over 462 selected pixels along a semi-orbit crossing the Pacific Ocean (Figure 5).
Figure 5 : Location of pixels used in retrievals in the semi-realistic case (stars represents sub-satellite track).
Data sources for SSS retrieval simulations are:
for SSS: monthly climatological 1° Levitus field (January month) (Antonov, Levitus
et al. 1998)
for SST: weekly 1° Reynolds analysis (30decembre 2001-5janvier 2002) (Reynolds
and Smith 1994)
for wind components: daily 1° QSCAT map (02 Janvier 2002) generated from JPLnudge
level 2 wind product (25km resolution) using a simple objective analysis
(Boutin and Etcheto 1997).
for Total Electronic content (TEC): International Reference Ionosphere (Floury pers.
comm.) years 1989, January.
with one simulated half orbit over the central Pacific ocean.
The selected data sets for the simulations are roughly representative of geophysical
conditions encountered at global scale (see Table 1).
Global ocean Simulated SMOS ascending orbit
mean standard mean standard
deviation
deviation
SSS (psu) 34.67 1.56 34.84 0.89
SST (K) 291.37 9.95 294.31 6.71
wind speed (m.s -1 ) 7.87 3.00 6.77 2.02