Satellite-based regional sea surface salinity maps for enhanced understanding of freshwater fluxes in the Southern Ocean

Abstract

This paper presents a newly developed Sea Surface Salinity (SSS) product for the Southern Ocean (SO), derived from SMOS (Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity) measurements by the Barcelona Expert Center (BEC). The primary challenges in retrieving SSS from L-band brightness temperature (TB) measurements in the Southern Ocean include degraded sensitivity in cold waters, radiometric signal contamination near sea ice edges and low variability in SSS across the region. To address these challenges, significant improvements were made to the retrieval algorithms. The BEC SO SSS product v1.0 delivers 9 d SSS maps on a 25 km EASE-SL grid, generated daily. The time series spans from 1 February 2011, to 31 March 2023, with spatial coverage below 30° S (10.20350/digitalCSIC/15493, ). The product shows high accuracy farther than 150 km from sea ice edges, with nearly zero bias and a standard deviation of 0.22 (compared to marine mammal data) and 0.25 (compared to TSG data from research vessels). Larger errors are observed within 150 km from the ice edges, due to residual sea-ice contamination and sampling-related errors in these dynamic areas. The product effectively captures seasonal and interannual variability, in line with the SOSE regional model. Although differences between satellite-derived and in situ salinity are more pronounced in these regions, the satellite product successfully reproduces the dynamics near ice edges. This product will significantly contribute to the understanding of processes influenced by upper-ocean salinity, including sea ice dynamics, particularly, the reduction of Antarctic sea ice extent and the opening of offshore polynyas.

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