Surface Salinity Retrieved from SMOS Measurements over the Global Ocean: Imprecisions Due to Sea Surface Roughness and Temperature Uncertainties

International audienceThe Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity (SMOS) mission recently led by the European Space Agency (ESA) intends to monitor soil moisture and sea surface salinity (SSS). Since the sensitivity of radiometric L-band signal to SSS is weak, measuring SSS with an acceptable accuracy is challenging: it requires both a very stable instrument and very precise corrections of other geophysical signals than the SSS affecting the L-band signal. Concentration is on the sea surface roughness and temperature (SST) effects and the extent to which they need to be corrected to optimize both SSS precision and retrieval complexity. In addition to uncertainties regarding SST and wind speed (W), realistic noise on the SMOS brightness temperatures (Tb's) are considered and possible consequences of Tb biases are examined. In most oceanic regions, random noise in W, SST, and Tb should not hamper the SMOS SSS retrieval within the Global Ocean Data Assimilation Experiment (GODAE) requirements (a precision better than 0.1 pss over 200 km 3 200 km and 10 days). However, minimizing systematic bias errors over the time scale at which the SSS products will be averaged is critical: the GODAE requirement will not be met if Tb's or W is biased in warm waters (258C) by 0.07 K and 0.3 m s 21 , respectively, and in cold waters (58C) by 0.03 K and 0.15 m s 21 , respectively, or if no a priori information on W is available. In order to minimize errors coming from the W natural variability, it is essential to use high-temporal-resolution wind data. The use of the first Stokes parameter instead of bipolarized Tb degrades the SSS precision by less than 10% in most regions, showing that Faraday rotation should not hamper SMOS SSS retrieval