Aggregation and disaggregation of synthetic l-band soil moisture data over South-western France in preparation of SMOS

For the preparation of the soil moisture and ocean salinity (SMOS) mission, due for launch in 2008, a synthetic study for the aggregation and disaggregation of L-band brightness temperature fields is currently being undertaken for a 5-year period (2000-2005) over south-western France. The observed soil moisture is derived from offline simulations obtained from the Meteo-France land surface model ISBA-A-gs. The radiative transfer model L-MEB is used to estimate the corresponding brightness temperature at 8 km resolution, with a large number of possible incidence angles for each time step. Aggregation of the distributed information is then undertaken by simulating overpasses of SMOS over the region. Finally, the disaggregation method is an extension of the approach presented by Merlin et al. (2005).