ESA Arctic+ Salinity Product V4: Reducing the Contamination Close to the Ice-Edge

In the framework of the ESA regional initiative Arctic+ Salinity, a new Sea Surface Salinity (SSS) product (v4) has been developed from the Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity (SMOS) measurements. The data processing starts from the SMOS Level 0 (L0) data and applies specific algorithms for reducing the contamination close to the ice edge at Level 1 (L1) (in the Brightness Temperature reconstruction) and at Level 2 (L2) (in the correction of biases in the salinity retrieval). In this work we explain these algorithms and present the new 13-year temporal series of SMOS SSS maps as well as the main results of the quality assessment.