Barcelona Expert Center: SMOS SSS products and beyond

Abstract

Since its creation in 2007, the Barcelona Expert Center (BEC) has been devoted to the development of new algorithms for the high-level processing of SMOS data. The objective was, now and then, to approach SMOS products to the user community. To reach that goal, since 2013 BEC hosts its own production center and distribution webserver. The catalogue of SMOS products offered in the webserver so far includes a long series of advanced Sea Surface Salinity products (produced with the debiased non-Bayesian retrieval, which corrects many known errors in SMOS), high-resolution Soil Moisture products and, since very recently, Sea Ice Coverage maps. BEC products are among the best SMOS products in the world; BEC was the first center to produce Mediterranean and Arctic SSS, with a quality which is still not overcome. In addition to the catalogue of SMOS products, high-quality, high-resolution daily maps of Singularity Exponents derived from OSTIA Sea Surface Temperature are also offered. Besides, there is a web-based singularity analysis service that allows the users to compute the singularity exponents associated to any variable in a given file, once it is uploaded in the system. Apart from the product catalogue, BEC maintains an intense research activity in the field of remote sensing, with a main focus in further improvements of the processing of SMOS data and their geophysical exploitation, but what also includes new missions and sensors, as for instance SMAP, MERIS, MODIS, Sentinel-2 and Sentinel-3. The goal is to diversify the production and distribution of added-value products, especially in the oceanographic context