Tech Note Phase I: Final Report

Contracted by the European Space Agency (ESA), the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) is involved in global monitoring and data assimilation of the Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity (SMOS) mission data. For the first time, a new innovative remote sensing technique based on radiometric aperture synthesis is used to observe soil moisture over continental surfaces and ocean salinity over oceans. Since SMOS was launched in November 2009, ECMWF has been monitoring SMOS brightness temperatures, and in near real time since November 2010. Some recent technical developments have also made it possible to incorporate SMOS data within the ECMWF Simplified Extended Kalman Filter (SEKF) for the analysis of soil moisture.

This is the final report of the ESA contract 20244/07/I-LG, which is the phase-I of the monitoring-assimilation study of SMOS brightness temperatures at ECMWF. The objective is to provide a summary of the main achievements reached in phase-I. An extended description of the technical implementation of SMOS data in the ECMWF SEKF scheme is provided too.