Performance of a spatial error correction technique in SMOS brightness temperature images

Abstract

Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity (SMOS) brightness temperature synthesized images are obtained after a comprehensive calibration and error correction procedure. However, the final images are still contaminated by small but non-negligible spatial errors: the so-called pixel bias. These errors have been found to be very stable in the SMOS Alias-Free Field of View (AF-FoV) and can be mitigated, to a large extent, by applying a multiplicative mask to the measured brightness temperatures at the antenna plane. This paper describes the procedure to upgrade this mask to cover SMOS Extended AF-FoV.