SMOSIce-project

The Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity (SMOS) satellite allow us to derive and monitor the soil moisture on land and the ocean surface salinity using a radiometer operating at L-Band with aperture synthesis (MIRAS).  In addition to these applications following the main goals of the ESA SMOS mission one can use this data to derive the thickness of sea ice up to a value of about 50 cm under freezing conditions. The Institute of Oceanography (IfM) of  the University of Hamburg, contributed, among others, substantially to the development of an algorithm to retrieve the sea ice thickness from SMOS data. Preliminary results are presented on the SMOSIce Wiki-web-page of the sea ice working group at IfM. A consolidated SMOS sea ice thickness data set will be distributed through this website in Spring 2013.

The SMOS intensities are offered near-real time (from the previous day), gridded onto a polar-stereographic grid for both hemispheres in netCDF format here at the L3B SMOS Brightness Temperature beim ICDC.