GLOSCAL (Global Ocean Surface Salinity Calibration and Validation) is a project retained as one of the ESA CalVal project. Since 2006, it is supported by the TOSCA programm of CNES.

The project has two main objectives:

Analysis of the surface properties from in-situ data

This objective focuses on the vertical and horizontal SSS structures at pixel scale, on the large scale variability and climatology building, on the parameters controlling the SSS. It includes the building of quality controlled in-situ databases.

Calibrate/validate SMOS data and improve the algorithms

This thematic relies on statistic analysis of brightness temperature, biases and error sources estimation, improvement of direct models and SSS algorithms, validation of SMOS SSS data by a systematic and global comparison with available in-situ data.

Providing reliable in-situ surface temperature and salinity data over the global ocean within short delay is critical for the calibration and validation of SMOS. The work presented here has been undertaken as a contribution to GLOSCAL. Based on the Coriolis datasets and using ISAS objective analysis tool, a near real time analysis system has been developed. It provides gridded fields of sea surface salinity and temperature and the corresponding in-situ dataset. In addition to research activities, these products would be used to help the quality control of SMOS satellite data, and to improve the algorithms and monitor sensor drifts and biases.

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Last Salinity and Temperature gridded fields:

Salinity Temperature

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