Meetings: Documents

RSS/NASA SMAP Salinity Version 3 Release
[14-Dec-2018] Manaster, A., Meissner, T., and Wentz., F.J.
Presented at the 2018 AGU Fall Meeting
Our presentation gives a detailed account of the RSS Version 3 SMAP SSS release, which is scheduled for summer 2018. This release represents several significant upgrades over the previous RSS Version 2 SMAP SSS products.
The major step in going from SMAP Version 2 to Version 3 is the use of the Aquarius Version 5 geophysical model function, which has been adapted to SMAP. In particular, Aquarius Version 5 and SMAP Version 3 use the same models for the dielectric constant, atmospheric oxygen absorption, surface roughness correction, Faraday rotation and reflected galactic radiation. This results in consistent geophysical salinity retrieval algorithms for the two sensors. Version 3 of SMAP SSS also includes an improved correction for land contamination and IMERG rain rates, which are used to correct for atmospheric cloud water absorption.
We will provide validation results for the Version 3 RSS SMAP salinity against ground truth measurements from ARGO drifters. Most of the zonal and temporal biases that were observed in the RSS/NASA SMAP Version 2 product are removed or significantly mitigated in the new Version 3. We will also provide comparisons between the RSS/NASA Version 3 release with other SMAP salinity products, such as the ones from JPL or the BEC.