Title
Smos Brightness Temperature Angular Noise: Characterization, Filtering, And Validation
Abstract
The 2-D interferometric radiometer on board the Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity (SMOS) satellite has been providing a continuous data set of brightness temperatures, at different viewing geometries, containing information of the Earth's surface microwave emission. This data set is affected by several sources of noise, which are a combination of the noise associated with the radiometer itself and the different views under which a heterogeneous target, such as continental surfaces, is observed. As a result, the SMOS data set is affected by a significant amount of noise. For many applications, such as soil moisture retrieval, reducing noise from the observations while keeping the signal is necessary, and the accuracy of the retrievals depends on the quality of the observed data set. This paper investigates the averaging of SMOS brightness temperatures in angular bins of different sizes as a simple method to reduce noise. All the observations belonging to a single pixel and satellite overpass were fitted to a polynomial regression model, with the objective of characterizing and evaluating the associated noise. Then, the observations were averaged in angular bins of different sizes, and the potential benefit of this process to reduce noise from the data was quantified. It was found that, if a 2 degrees angular bin is used to average the data, the noise is reduced by up to 3 K. Furthermore, this method complements necessary data thinning approaches when a large volume of data is used in data assimilation systems.
Year
DOI
Venue
2014
10.1109/TGRS.2013.2293200
IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON GEOSCIENCE AND REMOTE SENSING
Keywords
Field
DocType
Noise filtering, numerical weather predictions (NWPs), Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity (SMOS)
Meteorology,Brightness temperature,Bin,Remote sensing,Polynomial regression,Filter (signal processing),Radiometry,Data assimilation,Brightness,Mathematics,Radiometer
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
52
9
0196-2892
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
1
0.40
6
Authors
5
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Joaquín Munoz Sabater1184.66
Patricia de Rosnay217523.79
Carlos Jimenez310.40
Lars Isaksen431.48
Clement Albergel5153.92