Global SMOS SSS maps

Global SSS maps are computed at BEC using a new methodological approach to cope with land and RFI contamination.

Products

Two different products are generated

L3

Daily map of 9-day in a rectangular grid at 0.25º resolution, from 2011 to 2019. Some of the improvements of the v2 product with respect to the previous versions are:

  1. Latitudinal and seasonal bias has been reduced;
  2. New filtering criteria have been applied to be more consistent with the geophysical signal;
  3. An estimate of the salinity uncertainty is provided in the L3 product.

L4

Daily fused with OSTIA SST maps in a rectangular grid at 0.05o resolution, from 2011 to 2019

These maps have been validated with near-surface measurements provided by Argo profilers, which allow us to define several quality metrics.

Related documents

  • Article: [Olmedo et al. 2021] Olmedo, E., González-Haro, C., Hoareau, N., Umbert, M., González-Gambau, V., Martínez, J., Gabarró, C., and Turiel, A.: Nine years of SMOS sea surface salinity global maps at the Barcelona Expert Center, Earth Syst. Sci. Data, 13, 857–888, https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-13-857-2021, 2021.
  • Data Description and Quality report: BEC-SMOS-PD-SSSv2-v1.pdf