SMOS+SOS Researchers Demonstrate Capability of SMOS at mesoscale

LOCEAN researchers have uncovered new information about sea surface salinity (SSS) errors and the capability of SMOS to measure mesoscale features in the open ocean. After removing systematic seasonal biases and regions affected by land-sea contamination, the rmse (root mean square error) of SMOS SSS at 100 km with respect to in situ measurements of SSS filtered at 0.25° from a research vessel is only 0.14.

In conclusion, SMOS sees realistic spatial structures at less than 300 km that ARGO cannot capture because of its lower resolution.