Meetings: Documents

Consistent Transition of Salinity Retrievals from Aquarius to SMAP
[12-Feb-2018] Meissner, T., Wentz, F.J., Manaster, A., and Lindsley, R.
Presented at the 2018 Ocean Sciences Meeting
The Aquarius Version 5.0 release in late 2017 has achieved an excellent level of accuracy and significantly mitigated most of the regional and seasonal biases that had been observed in prior releases. The SMAP NASA/RSS Version 2.0 release does not quite yet reach that level of accuracy. Our presentation discusses the necessary steps that need to be undertaken in the upcoming V 3.0 of the SMAP salinity retrieval algorithm to achieve a seamless transition between the salinity products from the two instruments. We also discuss where fundamental differences in the sensors make it difficult to reach complete consistency.
In the Aquarius V 4.0 and earlier releases, comparison with ARGO floats have revealed small fresh biases at low latitudes and larger seasonally varying salty biases at high latitudes. These biases have been tracked back to inaccuracies in the models that are used for correcting the absorption by atmospheric oxygen and for correcting the wind induced roughness. The geophysical models have been changed in Aquarius V5.0, which resulted in a significant improvement of these biases. The upcoming SMAP V3 release will implement the same geophysical model. In deriving the changes of the geophysical model, monthly ARGO analyzed fields from Scripps are now being used consistently as reference salinity for both Aquarius V5.0 and the upcoming SMAP V3.0 releases. Earlier versions had used HYOCM as reference salinity field.
The development of the Aquarius V 5.0 algorithm has already strongly benefited from the full 360o look capability of SMAP. This aided in deriving the correction of the reflected galaxy, which is a strong spurious signal for both sensors. Consistent corrections for the galactic signal are now used for both Aquarius and SMAP.
It is also important to filter out rain when developing the GMF and when validating the satellite salinities versus in-situ measurements on order to avoid mismatches due to salinity stratification in the upper ocean layer.
One major difference between Aquarius and SMAP is the emissive SMAP mesh antenna. In order to correct for it an accurate thermal model for the physical temperature of the SMAP antenna needs to be developed.

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