HR: 17:45h
AN: PP34A-08    [Abstracts]
TI: Simulation of spaceborne salinity observation of the world oceans
AU: * Kim, S
EM: kim@remss.com
AF: Remote Sensing Systems, 438 First St, Suite 200, Santa Rosa, CA 95401, United States
AU: Wentz, F J
EM: frank.wentz@remss.com
AF: Remote Sensing Systems, 438 First St, Suite 200, Santa Rosa, CA 95401, United States
AB: Surface salinity needs to be measured with an accuracy of 0.1-0.2 psu over 100-300km at 7-30day sampling interval, to monitor important open ocean phenomena such as North Atlantic thermohaline circulation, ocean surface freshwater balance, surface ocean stability in the western tropical Pacific Ocean, and halosteric effect on sea level. To address the need, a spaceborne L-band microwave radiometer, Aquarius, is under development by NASA for launch in 2010. The accuracy requirement of Aquarius mission is set to 0.2 psu over 100km for monthly averaged salinity observations. To examine the feasibility of the accuracy goal, we developed an end-to-end simulator incorporating surface emission model, radiative transfer model for the Earth and cosmic radiation, ionospheric model, and antenna model. The retrieval simulation corrects for these forward processes to estimate the surface salinity. The result shows that surface salinity may be retrieved with an accuracy better than 0.2 psu rms over the global open ocean (warm ocean with surface temperature higher than 10C, at least 500km away from the coast, and at 100km spatial resolution). The retrieval error increases toward colder seas.
DE: 1640 Remote sensing (1855)
DE: 1655 Water cycles (1836)
DE: 4513 Decadal ocean variability (1616, 1635, 3305, 4215)
DE: 6969 Remote sensing
SC: Paleoceanography and Paleoclimatology [PP]
MN: 2007 Fall Meeting