ESA’s Soil Moisture dnd Ocean Salinity Mission - Contributing to Water Resource Management

Abstract:

The Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity (SMOS) mission, launched in November 2009, is the European Space Agency’s (ESA) second Earth Explorer Opportunity mission. The scientific objectives of the SMOS mission directly respond to the need for global observations of soil moisture and ocean salinity, two key variables used in predictive hydrological, oceanographic and atmospheric models. SMOS observations also provide information on the characterisation of ice and snow covered surfaces and the sea ice effect on ocean-atmosphere heat fluxes and dynamics, which affects large-scale processes of the Earth’s climate system.

 The focus of this paper will be on SMOS’s contribution to support water resource management:

• SMOS surface soil moisture provides the input to derive root-zone soil moisture, which in turn provides the input for the drought index, an important monitoring prediction tool for plant available water. 
• In addition to surface soil moisture, SMOS also provides observations on vegetation optical depth. Both parameters aid agricultural applications such as crop growth, yield forecasting and drought monitoring, and provide input for carbon and land surface modelling.
• SMOS data products are used in data assimilation and forecasting systems. Over land, assimilating SMOS derived information has shown to have a positive impact on applications such as NWP, stream flow forecasting and the analysis of net ecosystem exchange. Over ocean, both sea surface salinity and severe wind speed have the potential to increase the predictive skill on the seasonal and short- to medium-range forecast range.
• Operational users in particular in Numerical Weather Prediction and operational hydrology have put forward a requirement for soil moisture data to be available in near-real time (NRT). This has been addressed by developing a fast retrieval for a NRT level 2 soil moisture product based on Neural Networks, which will be available by autumn 2015.

This paper will focus on presenting the above applications and used SMOS data products.