On the reduction of the systematic error in imaging radiometry by aperture synthesis: a new approach for the SMOS space mission

The SMOS mission is a European Space Agency project aimed at global monitoring of surface Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity from radiometric L-band observations. This work is concerned with the reduction of the systematic error (or bias) in the reconstruction of radiometric brightness temperature maps from SMOS interferometric measurements. A recent and efficient method has been proposed for reducing this error. However, a residual bias still persists. A new approach for reducing this bias down to residual values less than 0.1 K is presented here and illustrated with numerical simulations.