
What was the purpose of CoSMOS 2006?
The Campaign for Validating the Operation of SMOS (coSMOS) was designed to acquire SMOS-like data so that the algorithms were fine-tuned and properly validated before the launch of SMOS mission in 2007.
The European Space Agency conducted an airborne campaign to map sea surface salinity named "CoSMOS-OS" that took place in April 2006 over the Norway Sea off the coast of Stavenger.
The main objectives were:
- Improving the parameterizations of the dependencies between sea surface emissivity at L-band and surface roughness, and perform validation of currently used forward models in the SMOS Level 2 prototype processor,
- Estimating the contamination of measured brightness temperatures by rough sea surface scattering of solar and galactic radiation towards the radiometer, and,
- Clarifying possible physical causes for unexplained azimuthal oscillation of measured L-band brightness temperatures over the ocean (often referred to as "wiggles" in the SMOS community).
What was the outcome of CoSMOS 2006?
The following was successively conducted:
- An analysis of multi source-auxilliary data for Synergetic analysis of the CoSMOS campaign data and an in depth geophysical description of the campaign environment,
- the development of a complete aircraft L-band data Processor called TRAP and mimiking the L2PP built up. The TRAP code can be used for future (or past) aircraft data (re-)analysis.
- the development of data post-calibration methodologies. These developments are model free and only concept-based methods, using first and second Stokes parameters properties.
- An analysis to combine the data and form a validation dataset, that we used to study the data detail properties as function of incidence angle and wind speed.
- An analysis to provide the specific validation of the Level-2 roughness correction models with the validation CoSMOS dataset
- An analysis to provide the specific validation of the Level-1 and 2 sunglint correction models,
- developments to study the galactic glints phenomena and the validity of the Level-2 correction models,
- an analysis of the overall azimuthal signatures and particularly wind direction dependencies, and, finally
- developments of processing to attempt SSS retrievals across the Norvegian Coastal Current front.
The results obtained emphasize the strong interest of having both a Nadir and aft-looking antenna. Indeed, one of the major result of this campaign was to provide to the community a complete and to our opinion, good quality, data set for validation of the Level 2 PP forward models, prior the launch. The CoSMOS data set is to our knowledge unique for ocean brightness temperature measurements at L-band.
Download the CoSMOS 2006 Final Report
Year | 2006 |
Geographic Site | North Sea (Norway) |
Field of Application | Sea Surface Salinity with L-band radiometer, Sea Surface Roughness with GNSS reflection |
Data Size | 7.4 |
Digital Object Identifier: https://doi.org/10.5270/esa-xe06wq9 - CoSMOS 2006: "Scientific Data Analysis Report"