Proposal of a User Manual for SMOS Level-2 Land Products. Data Processing and Comparison with Ground Observations for their Validation

Abstract:

SMOS (Soil Moisture & Ocean Salinity)(Kerr, 2001) is an EO mission dedicated to carry out global measurements of soil moisture and sea surface salinity. The data obtained will help to deepen the knowledge on the Water Cycle, particularly the interaction processes between the Earth surface and the atmosphere. It will also help to improve numerical meteorological and climate models with better practical applications in floods, droughts, agriculture, water resources management, etc. In the framework of this mission, it will also be possible to improve microwave emission models. Figure 1 schematically shows how soil emissivity is influenced and related to soil moisture content through dielectric permittivity and other parameters which directly or indirectly affect the captured signal: temperature, soil composition and roughness, vegetation, snow presence, topography, etc. On the one side, the European Space Agency (ESA) developed the document ATBD (Algorithm Theorical Basis Document) as the basic document “that describe the algorithms which will produce higher level SMOS products. The document should focus on the scientific justification for the algorithms selected to derive the product, an outline of the proposed approach and a listing of the assumptions and limitations of the algorithm”. This document thus describes the physical bases and standpoints to extract and obtain Level-2 land products.

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