Earth-Viewing L-Band Radiometer Sensing of Sea Surface Scattered Celestial Sky Radiation—Part II: Application to SMOS

We examine how the rough sea surface scattering of L-band celestial sky radiation might affect the measurements of the future European Space Agency Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity (SMOS) mission. For this purpose, we combined data from several surveys to build a comprehensive all-sky L-band celestial sky brightness temperature map for the SMOS mission that includes the continuum radiation and the hydrogen line emission rescaled for the SMOS bandwidth. We also constructed a separate map of strong and very localized sources that may exhibit L-band brightness temperatures exceeding 1000 K. Scattering by the roughened ocean surface of radiation from even the strongest localized sources is found to reduce the contributions from these localized strong sources to negligible levels, and rough surface scattering solutions may be obtained with a map much coarser than the original continuum maps. In rough ocean surface conditions, the contribution of the scattered celestial noise to the reconstructed brightness temperatures is not significantly modified by the synthetic antenna weighting function, which makes integration over the synthetic beam unnecessary. The contamination of the reconstructed brightness temperatures by celestial noise exhibits a strong annual cycle with the largest contamination occurring in the descending swaths in September and October, when the specular projection of the field of view is aligned with the Galactic equator. Ocean surface roughness may alter the contamination by over 0.1 K in 30% of the SMOS measurements. Given this potentially large impact of surface roughness, an operational method is proposed to account for it in the SMOS level 2 sea surface salinity algorithm.