RSS SMAP Level 3 Sea Surface Salinity Standard Mapped Image Monthly V6.0 Validated Dataset

Description

The RSS SMAP Level 3 Sea Surface Salinity Standard Mapped Image Monthly V6.0 Validated Dataset produced by the Remote Sensing Systems (RSS) and sponsored by the NASA Ocean Salinity Science Team, is a validated product that provides orbital/swath data on sea surface salinity (SSS) derived from the NASA's Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP) mission. The SMAP satellite was launched on 31 January 2015 with a near-polar orbit at an inclination of 98 degrees and an altitude of 685 km. It has an ascending node time of 6 pm and is sun-synchronous. With its 1000km swath, SMAP achieves global coverage in approximately 3 days, but has an exact orbit repeat cycle of 8 days. Malfunction of the SMAP scatterometer on 7 July, 2015, has necessitated the use of collocated wind speed, primarily from WindSat, for the surface roughness correction required for the surface salinity retrieval.

The major changes in Version 6.0 from Version 5.0 are: (1) Removal of biases during the first few months of the SMAP mission that are related to the operation of the SMAP radar during that time. (2) Mitigation of biases that depend on the SMAP look angle. (3) Mitigation of salty biases at high Northern latitudes. (4) Revised sun-glint flag. The RSS SMAP L3 monthly product includes data for a range of parameters: derived sea surface salinity (SSS) with SSS-uncertainty, rain filtered SMAP sea surface salinity, collocated wind speed, data and ancillary reference surface salinity data from HYCOM. Each data file is available in netCDF-4 file format and is averaged over one-month time intervals with about 7-day latency (after the end of the averaging period). Data begins on April 1,2015 and is ongoing. Observations are global in extent with an approximate spatial resolution of 40KM. Note that while a SSS 40KM variable is also included in the product for most open ocean applications, The standard product of the SMAP Version 6.0 release is the smoothed salinity product with a spatial resolution of approximately 70 km.

Resources

Name Format Description Link
21 Known issues README https://archive.podaac.earthdata.nasa.gov/podaac-ops-cumulus-docs/smap/open/L3/RSS/README.txt
33 ATBD, Validation Analysis, Product Specifications, etc https://archive.podaac.earthdata.nasa.gov/podaac-ops-cumulus-docs/smap/open/docs/V6/Release_V6.0.pdf
21 Remote Sensing Systems SMAP Sea Surface Salinity Website http://www.remss.com/missions/smap
21 Data Use and Citation Policy https://podaac.jpl.nasa.gov/CitingPODAAC
21 HTTPS endpoint for data browse and download https://cmr.earthdata.nasa.gov/virtual-directory/collections/C2832226365-POCLOUD
21 Generic data readers https://github.com/podaac/data-readers
21 Data Subscriber https://github.com/podaac/data-subscriber
21 Dynamically updated RSS webpage listing L2 files with Bad Orbits http://images.remss.com/figures/missions/smap/bad_orbits.txt
21 Search results for publications that cite this dataset by its DOI. https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=10.5067%2FSMP60-3SMCS
21 Dynamically updated RSS webpage listing L2 files with missing ancillary data inputs http://images.remss.com/figures/missions/smap/bad_ancillaries.txt
33 SMAP-SSS V6.0 Technical Guide (ATBD, Validation Analysis, Product Format Specification) https://archive.podaac.earthdata.nasa.gov/podaac-ops-cumulus-docs/smap/open/docs/V6/ATBD_EOM_final.pdf
21 SMAP-SSS Project and Instrument Overview http://podaac.jpl.nasa.gov/smap
21 Information on Data Outages & Known Issues https://archive.podaac.earthdata.nasa.gov/podaac-ops-cumulus-docs/aquarius/open/README.KnownIssues.txt
22 Thumbnail https://podaac.jpl.nasa.gov/Podaac/thumbnails/SMAP_RSS_L3_SSS_SMI_MONTHLY_V6.jpg
21 NASA SMAP Mission Website http://smap.jpl.nasa.gov/
21 Browse granule search results in Earthdata Search https://search.earthdata.nasa.gov/search/granules?p=C2832226365-POCLOUD

Tags

  • salinity-density
  • oceans
  • earth-science

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