| Summary: | Living Planet Symposium, 23-27 May 2022, Bonn, Germany Southern Ocean Freshwater (SO FRESH) is a recent ESA funded project (2021-2023) included in the Polar Cluster Initiative. Polar Cluster aims at establishing collaboration with the existing projects in polar areas to maximize unique, added-value capabilities from ESA missions and remote sensing missions in general. In that sense, Polar Cluster intends to fill knowledge gaps in specific hot topics of polar research. SO FRESH main goal is to improve our understanding of the different processes governed or affected by freshwater fluxes in the Southern Ocean. SO FRESH scientific objectives are based on four specific case studies: i) to improve our understanding on the changes in Antarctic Sea Ice; ii) to characterize the drivers of the formation of the Weddell Polynya in 2016-2017; iii) to assess salinity changes in the Antarctic coastal region and elucidate their causes/consequences; and iv) to analyze the formation of deep water via remote sensing variables. A key aspect to SO FRESH is the availability of continuous series of accurate geophysical variables with a space-time resolution adequate for the case studies. The key ocean variable for the four case studies is Sea Surface Salinity (SSS). SSS can be used in combination with other ocean variables (i.e. Sea Surface Temperature, Sea Surface Height Anomalies) to enhance the state of the art of SO freshwater fluxes, Sea Surface Density variability and Water Mass Transformation Rates. In that regards, special effort will be put in applying all recent advancements in SSS processing in the context of ESA SMOS Mission, in order to enhance its quality: nodal sampling, PSF correction, TB fusion, enhanced Debiased non-Bayesian retrieval, etc. Specific quality metrics, developed for SO FRESH, will be used for the data quality control and validation. SO FRESH started in May 2021, and the first set of data is expected to be available for distribution by the beginning of 2022. In this talk, we will present the results ...
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