The SMOS Level 2 Soil Moisture data available in NRT based on a neural network approach (Level-2 SM-NRT-NN product in netCDF format) are now available via EUMETCast, within four hours from sensing.

ESA has created a User Satisfaction Survey which aims to help us to improve the services to all users of ESA Earth Observation, Copernicus Sentinel and Third Party Missions.

More than 600 participants have already provided their feedback during the recent Living Planet Symposium in Prague.

The survey, addressed to both scientific and commercial data users, will remain open until 31 May 2016.

On 8 March 2016, ECMWF upgraded the integrated forecasting system (IFS). The new cycle, labelled 41r2 (previous cycle was labelled 41r1), includes a number of enhancements to the model, to the data assimilation and the increase of the horizontal resolution which is now about 9 km for the high-resolution (HRES) forecast and the data assimilation schema. For further details about this upgrade see the related ECMWF web-page.

ESA's SMOS satellite has found a rise in fresh water in the tropical Pacific Ocean during last year's El Niño event.

The dedicated special issue on SMOS: ‘ESA's Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity Mission - Achievements and Applications' in the Remote Sensing of Environment (RSE) journal volume 180 (2016) is now available on the Science Direct website.

Ground measurements are essential for making sure that satellites deliver accurate information about our changing world. Although the Tibetan Plateau may not seem the obvious place to take such readings, this remote location is being used to check on ESA's SMOS satellite.

ESA would like to inform the SMOS data user community about new experimental level 3 and level 4 sea surface salinity products over the Mediterranean Sea available from the SMOS Barcelona Expert Centre (SMOS-BEC, CP34).