SMAP Sea Surface Salinity Validation and the Observations of the plume of Hurricane Dorian

Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP) Version 4.0 Sea Surface Salinity (SSS) data has been released by Remote Sensing System in August 2019. The Salinity Validation Data System performed the assessment of SMAP SSS and showed great improvement in the recent version compared to Version 3.0, including lower biases globally and near the coastal regions.

Hurricane Dorian formed on August 24 and reached its peak intensity on September 1. It was an extremely intense and long-lived tropical cyclone in category 5. The Amazon-Orinoco plume associated with Hurricane Dorian was clearly observed from SMAP SSS. The center of the plume was lower than 32 psu and was more than 4 psu lower compared to outside the plume. Due to the large salinity variations, the salinity gradients generated from the SSS data are useful for depicting the structures of the plume. The latency (time delay between data measurement on the satellite and process data set) of RSS/SMAP Level-3 8-day running average is 3 days, indicating the plume occurred by the Hurricanes can be updated with SMAP SSS with 3-day latency.