SMOS Brightness Temperatures at 40° incidence angle Arctic

• Main Authors: Schmitt, Amelie, Kaleschke, Lars
• Format: Other/Unknown Material
• Language: unknown
• Published: Zenodo 2018
• Subjects: SMOS; Arctic; L-band; Passive Microwave; Polar; Sea ice
• Online Access: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.1631762

This is a data set of polarised brightness temperatures (TBs) at 40° incidence angle from the L-band (1.4 GHz) passive microwave sensor flying onboard the Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity (SMOS) mission. The data set was produced to enable a consistent combination of TBs from SMOS with those measured by the SMAP (Soil Moisture Active Passive) satellite. It is based on the version v620 SMOS L1C brightness temperatures, which are not corrected with respect to solar and cosmic radiation or atmospheric effects. A fitting function is applied to the daily multi-angular SMOS data (see Zhao et al., 2015 and Schmitt and Kaleschke, 2018) to obtain brightness temperature values at the SMAP incidence angle of 40°. The data are gridded to a north polar EASE-grid 2.0 (Brodzik et al. 2012) with a grid size of 12.5 km. The data were produced within the framework of the EU Horizon2020 project SPICES and therefore only covers the period from the first available SMAP data to the end of the project (1 April 2015 to 31 May 2018). Within SPICES, SMOS and SMAP data were combined to a homogenized data set, which was then used to estimate sea ice thickness. For details see Schmitt and Kaleschke (2018) and the related data sets of SMAP TBs and SMOS/SMAP sea ice thickness. The files contain the following data fields: Tbv - brightness temperatures at vertical polarisation at 40° incidence angle Tbh - brightness temperatures at horizontal polarisation at 40° incidence angle RMSE_v - root-mean-squared-error of fitting function for horizontal polarisation RMSE_h - root-mean-squared-error of fitting function for horizontal polarisation nmp - number of incidence angles used for the fit dataloss - fraction of discarded data The grid coordinates are provided as a separate file Latlon_e12.5.nc