The first products derived over France in 2010 from the L-band brightness temperatures (Tb) measured by the SMOS (Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity) satellite, launched in November 2009, were compared with the surface soil moisture (SSM) estimates produced by the C-band Advanced Scatterometer, ASCAT, launched in 2006 on board METOP-A. SMOS and ASCAT SSM products were compared with the simulation...

Further information Details on the processing algorithms can be found in the Algorithm Theoretical Baseline Document (ATBD, version 3.6), and on the L2SM products structure in the SMOS Level 2 and Auxiliary Data Products Specifications (SO-TN-IDRGS-0006, Issue 6.1 2012-02-09), both available from ARRAY (www.array.ca/smos) or the CESBIO blog (www.cesbio.upstlse.fr/SMOS_blog/) or ESA (http://eart...

Extant models of the financial patronage of Social Movement Organisations (SMOs) by private foundations exclusively use population density to account for competition. However, density fails to reveal how SMOs win grants whilst neglecting the strategic decision-making of foundation-investors. Here I recast patronage as a mutualistic network represented by a dynamic bipartite graph wherein SMOs a...

The European Space Agency (ESA) successfully launched the Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity (SMOS) mission in November 2, 2009. SMOS uses a new type of instrument, a synthetic aperture radiometer named MIRAS that provides full-polarimetric multi-angular L-band brightness temperatures, from which regular and global maps of Sea Surface Salinity (SSS) and Soil Moisture (SM) are generated. Although ...

[1] The Microwave Imaging Radiometer using Aperture Synthesis (MIRAS) on board the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity (SMOS) mission for the first time measures globally Earth’s radiation at a frequency of 1.4 GHz (L-band). It had been hypothesized that L-band radiometry can be used to measure the sea ice thickness due to the large penetration depth in the sea ice me...