| Summary: | International audience The SMOS mission was launched in November 2009 and allows measuring the surface soil moisture over continental land, covering the entire surface in 3 days. The multi-angular algorithm also enables to estimate the vegetation opacity which is directly related to the water content of the canopy. The algorithm also distinguishes between low vegetation where most of the signal emanates from the leaf and stems of the vegetation and the forests where the signal is mainly linked to the branch biomass at L band. ESA’s DPGS (European Space Agency’s Data Processing Ground Segment) has been delivering the so called Level 2 products, consisting in ½ orbits data for both products since launch. The CNES (Centre National d'Etudes Spatiales) has developed the CATDS (Centre Aval de Traitement des Données SMOS) ground segment that now provides spatial and temporal synthesis products (referred to as Level 3 products) enabling to better estimate the vegetation opacity ( as well as soil moisture and brightness temperature over land). After now several years of availability, the soil moisture product is rather robust but the vegetation opacity, either obtained at level 2 or 3 still suffers from several flaws, even if it looks promising. Work was also performed on the improvement of dielectric constant modelling either on modelling site or ground measurements. A particular emphasis was done or organic rich soils. A number of higher level products have been developed and tested, ranging from sea ice thickness to drought indices root zone soil moisture and freeze indices. In this presentation we will look at the products and how they are obtained and validated as well as the main results obtained over both low vegetation and forested areas.
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