A Joint ESA-NASA Platform for Satellite Salinity Validation and Exploitation

Sebastien Guimbard, OceanScope, Brest, France, Reul Nicolas, Ifremer, La Seyne sur Mer, CDX, France, Roberto Sabia, Telespazio-Vega for European Space Agency, Frascati, Italy, Sylvain Herlédan, OceanDataLab, Locmaria Plouzané, France, Ziad El Khoury Hanna, OceanDataLab, France, Fabrice Collard, OceanDataLab, Plouzané, France, Susanne Mecklenburg, European Space Agency, Italy, Henri Laur, ESA, Frascati, Italy, Tong Lee, JPL, Pasadena, United States, Julian J Schanze, Earth and Space Research, Seattle, WA, United States and Nadya Vinogradova Shiffer, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC, United States
Abstract:
The SMOS Pilot Mission Exploitation Platform (Pi-MEP) for Salinity started as an ESA initiative to support and widen the uptake of Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity (SMOS) mission data over ocean. The Platform ambition is twofold:

  1. i) To improve satellite salinityvalidation, by allowing systematic inter-comparison of various EO datasets with a broad suite of in-situ data;
  2. ii) To enhance oceanographic process studiesin different domains, capitalizing on satellite salinity data in synergy with additional satellite estimates.

The Pi-MEP has become a reference hub for the SMOS salinity mission providing access altogether to other satellite (SMAP, Aquarius) and additional thematic datasets (such as precipitation, evaporation, currents, sea level anomalies, ocean color, sea surface temperature).

Match-up databases of satellite/in situ (such as ARGO, TSG, moorings, drifters) data and corresponding validation reports at different spatiotemporal scales are systematically generated; furthermore, recently-developed dedicated tools allow data visualization, metrics computation and user-driven features extractions.

The Platform is also meant to monitor salinity in selected oceanographic “case studies”, ranging from tropical river plumes monitoring to SSS characterization at high latitudes or in semi-enclosed basins.

More recently, during the ESA Living Planet Symposium 2019, the Platform has been released in its operational fashion (www.smos-pimep.org) and therefore fully accessible to the wider oceanographic community for their validation/exploitation studies.

In parallel, a project partnership with NASA was devised in 2018, and a strategic roadmap was identified early in 2019. After the official collaboration rollout at the OceanObs-19 conference, the two agencies are working together to widen the platform features on several technical aspects - ranging from a triple-collocation software implementation to a sustained exploitation of data from the SPURS campaigns.

The platform capabilities evolution and the progress of the ESA-NASA joint activities will be described at the conference.

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