SMAP L1B Brightness Temperatures Arctic

This is a data set of polarised brightness temperatures (TBs) from the L-band (1.4 GHz) passive microwave sensor flying onboard the Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP) satellite. The data set was produced to enable a consistent combination of TBs from SMAP with those measured by the SMOS (Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity) mission.

It is based on the version 3 SMAP L1B brightness temperatures (Piepmeier et al., 2016), which are not corrected with respect to solar and cosmic radiation or atmospheric effects. The data are aggregated daily and gridded to a north polar EASE-grid 2.0 (Brodzik et al. 2012) with a grid size of 12.5 km. The data were produced within the framework of the EU Horizon2020 project SPICES and therefore only covers the period from the first available SMAP data to the end of the project (1 April 2015 to 31 May 2018).

Within SPICES, SMAP and SMOS data were combined to a homogenized data set, which was then used to estimate sea ice thickness. For details see Schmitt and Kaleschke (2018) and the related data sets of SMOS TBs and SMOS/SMAP sea ice thickness.

The files contain the following data fields:
Tbv - brightness temperatures at vertical polarisation
Tbh - brightness temperatures at horizontal polarisation
Tbv_std - weighted standard error of Tbv
Tbh_std - weighted standard error of Tbh
nmp - effective number of measurements used for averaging

The grid coordinates are provided as a separate file Latlon_e12.5.nc