Arctic salinity from space: Monitoring the freshwater system.
Abstract
The Arctic Ocean contains only a 1% of the world’s ocean water, but the
rivers that flow out into it account for the 10% of the volume world’s
rivers freshwater. The upper layer of fresher water facilitates the
creation of sea ice and plays an important role in the position of the
jet stream and storms over the northern hemisphere [ISBN,
978-82-7971-097-4]. Remote sensing measurements are of special
importance in the Arctic since in situ data is very scarce there. SMOS
and SMAP are currently providing sea surface salinity (SSS) measures,
but only the product provided by Barcelona Expert Center (BEC) is a
dedicated product for the Arctic region. The product that we present in
this work is an improvement of the BEC Arctic v2.0. The new version 3.0
has as the primary objective the describing better the river discharges.
The spatial grid used is WGS84/NSIDC EASE-Grid 2.0 North for the all
stages of the processing chain. This procedure avoids spatial
interpolation, favoring the definition of river mouths. The salinity
retrieval is based on the Debiased non-bayesian method
[doi:10.1016/j.rse.2017.02.023] and similarly to what is done in the
processing of altimetric data, SMOS salinity is corrected using a
reference calculated from the own SMOS data for each latitude,
longitude, pass orientation and antenna measuring position. Arctic v3.0
differs from current method [doi:10.3390/rs10111772] in two
important points: the reference is computed for brightness temperature
instead of SSS and the antenna has been divided in a more homogeneous
grid. Other improvements concern to data filtering and propagation of
the radiometric errors to SSS. All these improvements provide level 3
maps less noisy, increasing the effective resolution of salinity
gradients. Freshwater gradients are much better resolved than in
previous version (Fig. 1). Comparison with JPL SMAP product is also
planned as a first step to generate a combined product. This work is
funded by ESA Arctic + project and also includes the assimilation of the
resulting SSS product in the ocean-sea ice data assimilation system
TOPAZ as the next version TOPAZ5. A preliminary study
[doi:10.5194/os-2018-163] has been performed concluding that BEC
product could be a good candidate to be assimilated by TOPAZ. Moreover,
some preliminary tests with a pre-release v3.0 version will start
shortly.