| Summary: | European Space Agency (ESA) Living Planet Symposium, 9-13 September 2013, Edinburgh The Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity (SMOS) mission, launched on 2 November 2009, is the European Space Agency's (ESA) second Earth Explorer Opportunity mission. The scientific objectives of the SMOS mission directly respond to the current lack of global observations of soil moisture and ocean salinity, two key variables used in predictive hydrological, oceanographic and atmospheric models. SMOS observations also provides information on the characterisation of ice and snow covered surfaces and the sea ice effect on ocean-atmosphere heat fluxes and dynamics, which affects large-scale processes of the Earth's climate system. This paper will provide an overview on the various aspects of the SMOS mission, such as 1. The performance of the mission after 4 years in orbit: The SMOS mission has been in routine operations since May 2010, following the successful completion of the 6-months commissioning phase. SMOS has so far provided very reliable instrument operations, data processing and dissemination to users. 2. An overview on the SMOS data products: SMOS provides continuously level 1 (brightness temperature) and level 2 (soil moisture and ocean salinity) to its scientific user community since summer 2010. SMOS also provides brightness temperature data (level 1 data) to ECMWF in near-real time (NRT), who assimilates the data into their forecasting system. New services have been established to deliver a tailored NRT data product via the WMO's GTS and EUMETSAT's EUMETCast data dissemination systems to other operational agencies. This will open up new operational applications for SMOS data. New data products are under development, responding to the requirements of the science community in particular in the area of hydrology, climate, land use and ship routing, namely a frozen soil indicator, data products for freeze/thaw periods, sea ice thickness and vegetation water content. 3. An overview on the SMOS data quality and the overall ...
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