Title
Intercomparison of In-Situ and Remote Sensing Salinity Products in the Gulf of Mexico, a River-Influenced System.
Abstract
The recent emergence of satellite-based sea surface salinity (SSS) measurements provides new opportunities for oceanographic research on freshwater influence in coastal environments. Several products currently exist from multiple observing platforms and processing centers, making product selection for different uses challenging. Here we evaluate four popular SSS datasets in the Gulf of Mexico (GoM) to characterize the error in each product versus in-situ observations: Two products from NASA's Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP) mission, processed by Remote Sensing Systems (REMSS) (40 km and 70 km); one SMAP 60 km product from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL); and one 60 km product from ESA's Soil Moisture Ocean Salinity (SMOS) mission. Overall, the four products are remarkably consistent on seasonal time scales, reproducing dominant salinity features. Towards the coast, 3 of the 4 products (JPL SMAP, REMSS 40 km SMAP, and SMOS) show increasing salty biases (reaching 0.7-1 pss) and Root Mean Square Error (RMSD) (reaching 1.5-2.5 pss), and a decreasing signal to noise ratio from 3 to 1. REMSS 40 km generally shows a lower RMSD than other products (0.5 vs. 1.1 pss) in the nearshore region. However, at some buoy locations, SMOS shows the lowest RMSD values, but has a higher bias overall (>0.2 vs. <0.1 pss). The REMSS 70km product is not consistent in terms of data availability in the nearshore region and performs poorly within 100 km of the coast, relative to other products. Additional analysis of the temporal structure of the errors over a range of scales (8/9-day to seasonal) shows significantly decreasing RMSD with increasing timescales across products.
Year
DOI
Venue
2018
10.3390/rs10101590
REMOTE SENSING
Keywords
Field
DocType
sea surface salinity,SMAP,SMOS,Gulf of Mexico,validation
Buoy,In situ,Satellite,Data availability,Remote sensing,Product selection,Water content,Salinity,Geology,Sea surface salinity
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
10
10
2072-4292
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
0
0.34
1
Authors
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Jorge Vazquez-Cuervo143.36
Severine Fournier212.12
Brian Dzwonkowski361.01
j t reager421.80