ESA's Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity Mission: Mission Performance and Operations

Soil moisture retrieval from space: the Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity (SMOS) mission

Microwave radiometry at low frequencies (L-band: 1.4 GHz, 21 cm) is an established technique for estimating surface soil moisture and sea surface salinity with a suitable sensitivity. However, from space, large antennas (several meters) are required to achieve an adequate spatial resolution at L-band. So as to reduce the problem of putting into orbit a large filled antenna, the possibility of u...

Sea Surface Salinity Retrieval within the ESA Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity (SMOS) Mission

The SMOS (Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity) mission will provide from 2007 onwards global maps of soil moisture over land and sea surface salinity over ocean. The radiometry group of the Technical University of Catalonia (UPC) in Barcelona has been involved either in the definition of the SMOS single payload, MIRAS (Microwave Imaging Radiometer by Aperture Synthesis), or in the organization of ...

The objectives and rationale of the Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity (SMOS) Mission

This paper will describe the SMOS concept in terms of instrument (characteristics) investigates the main aspects of the retrieval capabilities of the 2-D microwave interferometer for monitoring soil moisture, vegetation biomass and surface temperature. The analysis is based on model inversion taking into account the instrument characteristics. The standard error of estimate of the surface varia...

Mission Objectives and Scientific Requirements of the Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity (SMOS)

The main scientific objectives of the Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity (SMOS) mission are to observe two crucial variables: soil moisture over land surface and sea surface salinity over oceans. The mission should also provide information on root zone soil moisture and vegetation and contribute to significant research in the field of the cryosphere SMOS is a demonstrator with broad and ambitious...

Introduction to the Special Issue on the ESA's Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity Mission (SMOS) - Instrument Performance and First Results