Sebastien Guimbard

OceanScope

Arctic SSS L3 v4 product by BEC

The monsoon freshwater and wind forcing drive high Sea Surface Salinity (SSS) contrasts and variability (up to 10 pss range) in the Bay of Bengal (BoB), with important consequences for upper ocean mixing and air-sea interactions. Synoptic SSS maps did only become available with the advent of L-band radiometers in 2010, due to insufficient prior in...

The Vendée Globe is the world’s most famous solo, non-stop, unassisted sailing race. The Institute of Marine Sciences and the Barcelona Ocean Sailing Foundation installed a MicroCAT on the One Ocean One Planet boat. The skipper, Dídac Costa, completed the round trip in 97 days, from 8 November 2020 to 13 February 2021, providing one measurement of...

Validation of satellite sea surface salinity (SSS) products is typically based on comparisons with in-situ measurements at a few meters’ depth, which are mostly done at a single location and time. The difference in term of spatio-temporal resolution between the in-situ near-surface salinity and the two-dimensional satellite SSS results in a samplin...

Validation of satellite sea surface salinity (SSS) products is typically based on comparisons with in-situ measurements at a few meters depth, that are mostly done at a single location and time. The difference in term of spatio-temporal resolution between the in-situ near-surface salinity and the two-dimensional satellite SSS results in a sampling...

Validation of satellite sea surface salinity (SSS) products is typically based on comparisons with in-15 situ measurements at a few meters depth, that are mostly done at a single location and time. The difference 16 in term of spatio-temporal resolution between the in-situ near-surface salinity and the two-dimensional 17 satellite SSS results in a...

Sea Surface Salinity (SSS) is an increasingly used Essential Ocean and Climate Variable. The Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity (SMOS), Aquarius, and Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP) satellite missions all provide SSS measurements, with very different instrumental features leading to specific measurement characteristics. The Climate Change Initiat...

The Pilot-Mission Exploitation Platform (Pi-MEP) for salinity is an ESA initiative originally meant to support and widen the uptake of Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity (SMOS) mission data over the ocean. Starting in 2017, the project aims at setting up a computational web-based platform focusing on satellite sea surface salinity data, supporting st...

The overall volume of freshwater entering the Arctic Ocean has been growing as glaciers melt and river runoff increases. Since 1980, a 20% increase in river runoff has been observed in the Arctic system. As the discharges of the Ob, Yenisei, and Lena rivers are an important source of freshwater in the Kara and Laptev Seas, an increase in river disc...

Plain Language Summary Tropical cyclones (TCs) generate a well‐known cooling of the ocean's surface. However, the response of the ocean's surface salinity to TCs, and the processes involved, are much less known. This response can be a potential indicator of salinity's control on TC‐induced ocean cooling: for some storms, stronger TC‐induced increas...

The similarity of mesoscale and submesoscale features observed in different ocean scalars indicates that they undergo some common non-linear processes. As a result of quasi-2D turbulence, complicated patterns of filaments, meanders, and eddies are recognized in remote sensing images. A data fusion method used to improve the quality of one ocean var...

Operated since the end of 2009, the European Space Agency (ESA) Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity (SMOS) satellite mission is the first orbiting radiometer that collects regular and global observations from space of two EssentialClimateVariablesoftheGlobalClimateObservingSystem:SeaSurfaceSalinity(SSS)andSoilMoisture. The National Aeronautics and Spac...

The quality of the Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity (SMOS) sea surface salinity (SSS) measurements has been noticeably improved in the past years. However, for some applications, there are still some limitations in the use of the Level-2 ocean salinity product. First, the SSS measurements are still affected by a latitudinal and seasonal bias. Secon...

available for 50-days since aug21 at ***** https://authors.elsevier.com/a/1ZKAh3IHZi6Vlc ****************** One of the saltiest seas, the Mediterranean, experiences significant salinity variations in near surface layers. Satellite sea surface salinity (SSS) data obtained using Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP) mission indicate steady salinifica...

The Eastern Pacific Fresh Pool (EPFP) is a large region of low Sea Surface Salinity (SSS) defined by values lower than 34 practical salinity scale within [5◦S-30◦N, 75◦W-180◦W]. The fresh pool dynamically responds to strong regional and seasonally varying ocean-atmosphere-land interactions (including monsoon rain, trade and gap winds and strong cur...

Five years of SMOS L-band brightness temperature data intercepting a large number of tropical cyclones (TCs) are analyzed. The storm-induced half-power radio-brightness contrast (δI) is defined as the difference between the brightness observed at a specific wind force and that for a smooth water surface with the same physical parameters. δI can be...

New sea surface salinity (SSS) observations derived from satellite remote sensing platforms provide a comprehensive view of salt exchanges across boundary currents such as the Gulf Stream. The high resolution (45km spatial resolution and three-day repeat subcycle) of the Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity (SMOS) observations allows detection (and tra...

A simplified parallel version of the Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity (SMOS) Level 2 Ocean Salinity (L2OS) processor is used to assess the optimal configuration of both the SMOS cost function and the corresponding minimization scheme for sea surface salinity (SSS) and wind speed (U10) retrievals. For such a purpose, both realistically simulated bri...

Measurement of ocean surface salinity dynamics from space poses numerous engineering and scientific challenges that push the boundaries of ocean remote sensing capabilities. The principles of measuring sea surface salinity (SSS) from space are well established. They involve precise determination of the dielectric characteristics of seawater through...

After 2.5 years of the Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity (SMOS) mission, the characterization of residual instrumental systematic errors in the measured brightness temperatures (TB) is still rather poor. This in turn negatively impacts the sea surface salinity retrievals and, as such, notably limits the mission’s success. The error mitigation method...

The Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity (SMOS) mission is one of the European Space Agency (ESA) Earth Explorer Opportunity Missions, which was proposed in 1998 within the ESA Living Planet Program. It was launched in November 2009 with the purpose to provide global maps of both soil moisture (SM) and sea surface salinity (SSS) with both spatial and t...

Capability for sea surface salinity observation was an important gap in ocean remote sensing in the last few decades of the 20th century. New technological developments during the 1990s at the European Space Agency led to the proposal of SMOS (Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity), an Earth explorer opportunity mission based on the use of a microwave i...

The Local Oscillators (LO) of the Microwave Imaging Radiometer using Aperture Synthesis (MIRAS) onboard the Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity (SMOS) satellite are used to maintain the operating frequency of the 69 receivers. The phase of the LO drifts over time, in turn blurring the MIRAS brightness temperature (TB) measurements. After a pre-launch...

The Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity (SMOS) mission was launched on November 2nd, 2009 aiming at providing sea surface salinity (SSS) estimates over the oceans with frequent temporal coverage. The detection and mitigation of residual instrumental systematic errors in the measured brightness temperatures are key steps prior to the SSS retrieval. For...

A prerequisite for the successful retrieval of geophys-ical parameters from remote sensing measurements is the develop-ment of an accurate forward model. The European Space Agency Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity (SMOS), carrying onboard an L-band interferometric radiometer (Microwave Interferometric Radiometer using Aperture Synthesis), was launch...

This work summarizes the activities carried out by the SMOS (Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity) Barcelona Expert Center (SMOS-BEC) team in conjunction with the CIALE/Universidad de Salamanca team, within the framework of the European Space Agency (ESA) CALIMAS project in preparation for the SMOS mission and during its first year of operation. Under...

The Microwave Imaging Radiometer using Aperture Synthesis (MIRAS) instrument onboard the Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity (SMOS) mission was launched on November 2nd, 2009 with the aim of providing, over the oceans, synoptic sea surface salinity (SSS) measurements with spatial and temporal coverage adequate for large-scale oceanographic studies. F...

This paper presents the soil moisture and ocean salinity maps from the SMOS mission generated operationally by the Spanish SMOS Level 3 and 4 data processing center (CP34) and experimentally by the SMOS Barcelona Expert Center (SMOS-BEC).

Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity (SMOS), launched on 2 November 2009, is the first satellite mission addressing sea surface salinity (SSS) measurement from space. Its unique payload is the Microwave Imaging Radiometer using Aperture Synthesis (MIRAS), a new two-dimensional interferometer designed by the European Space Agency (ESA) and operating at...

SMOS salinity inversion consists of minimizing the residual between measured and modeled brightness temperatures. The minimization procedure is a great challenge and crucial step, but its success depends on the quality of the forward model. Consequently, we present an empirical update of pre-launch L-band emissivity forward models, where the essent...

The Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity mission (SMOS) from the European Space Agency (ESA), launched in November 2009, has initiated the era of satellite-based sea surface salinity observations. The Microwave Interferometric Radiometer with Aperture Synthesis (MIRAS) instrument has been designed to exploit the correlation between the measurements of...

In response to the comment of Hwang [2009], this paper presents an addendum to the study published by Hauser et al. [2008] on the mean square slopes (mss) derived from radar observations (at C-band and incidence angles between 7 and 21°). Different sea state conditions are sorted out (swell, wind sea, and mixed sea) and their possible impact on mea...

Measurement of ocean surface salinity (SSS) dynamics from space involve precise determination of the dielectric characteristics of seawater through low-noise passive microwave (MW) radiometer measurement of the oceans brightness temperature (TB), optimally performed at a low frequency near 1.4 GHz (L-band). The future SMOS mission is based on such...

We present recent results from several studies and field experiments that were conducted to improve the retrieval of sea surface salinity from space, preparing for the soil moisture and ocean salinity (SMOS) mission. The sea surface roughness impact on L-band emissivity is analysed based on the data from the CoSMOS airborne campaign conducted in Ap...

Radar observations of the sea surface at C-Band and small incidence angles are used to investigate some properties of the surface slope probability density function (pdf). The method is based on the analysis of the variation of the radar cross-section with incidence angle, assuming a backscattering process following the Geometrical Optics theory. F...

Airborne radar observations of the sea surface at C- Band and small incidence angles are used to investigate some properties of the surface slope probability density function (pdf). The method is based on the analysis of the variation of the radar cross-section with incidence angle, assuming that the backscatter can be described by the Geometrical...