Articles | Volume 9, issue 1
https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-9-293-2017
https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-9-293-2017
Review article
 | 
06 Jun 2017
Review article |  | 06 Jun 2017

The global SMOS Level 3 daily soil moisture and brightness temperature maps

Ahmad Al Bitar, Arnaud Mialon, Yann H. Kerr, François Cabot, Philippe Richaume, Elsa Jacquette, Arnaud Quesney, Ali Mahmoodi, Stéphane Tarot, Marie Parrens, Amen Al-Yaari, Thierry Pellarin, Nemesio Rodriguez-Fernandez, and Jean-Pierre Wigneron

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Short summary
Surface soil moisture is a control variable for many processes linked to the water and carbon cycles. The global maps of soil moisture and brightness temperature using multiple orbits from the SMOS (Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity) mission are presented in this paper. The maps showed an increased number of retrievals over forest areas (9 %) compared to single-orbit retrievals. The brightness temperature observations from the L-band missions SMOS (ESA) and SMAP (NASA) are close (bias < −4 K).