Assessment of the SMOS inversion scheme for salinity and wind speed retrieval purposes

Abstract

A simplified parallel version of the Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity (SMOS) Level 2 Ocean Salinity (L2OS) processor is used to assess the optimal configuration of both the SMOS cost function and the corresponding minimization scheme for sea surface salinity (SSS) and wind speed (U10) retrievals. For such a purpose, both realistically simulated brightness temperatures (TBs) and a post-launch derived semi-empirical forward model are used. This study confirms the effectiveness of the L2OS configuration for SSS retrieval and provides the optimal configuration for U10 retrieval. A revised cost function formulation, where the observational term has more weight than the background one, is further assessed, which leads to smaller retrieval errors.