SMOS CATDS Level 3 products, Soil Moisture and Brightness Temperature

The ESA's (European Space Agency) SMOS (Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity) mission, operating since november 2009, is the first satellite dedicated to measuring the surface soil moisture and the ocean salinity. The CNES (Centre National d'Etudes Spatiales) has developed the CATDS (Centre Aval de Traitement des Données SMOS) ground segment. The CATDS provides temporal synthesis products (referred to as level 3) of soil moisture, which are now covering the whole SMOS period, i.e. since January 2010. These products have different time resolutions: daily products, 3-day global products (insuring a complete coverage of the Earth surface), 10-day composite products, and monthly averaged products. Moreover, a new product provides brightness temperatures at H and V polarizations which are computed at fixed incidence angles every 5 degrees. As the instrument measures L-band brightness temperatures at the antenna frame (X/Y polarizations), a rotation is applied to transform the observations to V/H polarizations. All the CATDS products are presented in the NetCDF format and on the EASE grid (Equal Area Scalable Earth grid) with a spatial resolution of ~ 25*25 km2 The soil moisture level 3 algorithm is based on ESA's (European Space Agency) level 2 retrieval scheme with the improvement of using several overpasses (3 at most) over a 7-day window. The use of many revisits is expected to improve the retrieved soil moisture. This communication aims at presenting the soil moisture and brightness temperature products from the CATDS as well as the other geophysical parameters retrieved, such as the vegetation optical depth or the dielectric constant of the surface. SMOS Level 3 soil moisture. 3-days aggregation product, the best estimation of soil moisture is chosen.