Sea Surface Salinity and Wind Speed Retrievals Using GNSS-R and L-Band Microwave Radiometry Data from FMPL-2 Onboard the FSSCat Mission

The Federated Satellite System mission (FSSCat), winner of the 2017 Copernicus Masters Competition and the first ESA third-party mission based on CubeSats, aimed to provide coarse-resolution soil moisture estimations and sea ice concentration maps by means of the passive microwave measurements colle...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Remote Sensing
Main Authors: Joan Francesc Munoz-Martin, Adriano Camps
Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
Language:English
Published: MDPI AG 2021
Subjects:
GNSS-R
L-band microwave radiometry
CubeSat
ocean salinity
wind speed
Science
Q
Antarctic
Arctic
Antarc*
Sea ice
Online Access:https://doi.org/10.3390/rs13163224
https://doaj.org/article/21db84bd88b9482a9ec551c30737a35f
Description
Summary:The Federated Satellite System mission (FSSCat), winner of the 2017 Copernicus Masters Competition and the first ESA third-party mission based on CubeSats, aimed to provide coarse-resolution soil moisture estimations and sea ice concentration maps by means of the passive microwave measurements collected by the Flexible Microwave Payload-2 (FMPL-2). The mission was successfully launched on 3 September 2020. In addition to the primary scientific objectives, FMPL-2 data are used in this study to estimate sea surface salinity (SSS), correcting for the sea surface roughness using a wind speed estimate from the L-band microwave radiometer and GNSS-R data themselves. FMPL-2 was executed over the Arctic and Antarctic oceans on a weekly schedule. Different artificial neural network algorithms have been implemented, combining FMPL-2 data with the sea surface temperature, showing a root-mean-square error (RMSE) down to 1.68 m/s in the case of the wind speed (WS) retrieval algorithms, and RMSE down to 0.43 psu for the sea surface salinity algorithm in one single pass.

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