Aquarius Official Release Level 3 Sea Surface Salinity Standard Mapped Image Annual Data V5.0 provides gridded, 1-degree spatial resolution sea surface salinity averages on an annual timescale. This version 5.0 dataset is the official end-of-mission public release from the NASA and CONAE collaborative AQUARIUS/SAC-D mission. The data was last updated in June 2015.
Use Cases
- Modeling ocean circulation and freshwater input by analyzing annual sea surface salinity maps.
- Calibrating other satellite salinity sensors using the 1.413 GHz radiometer brightness temperature (TH and TV) and 1.26 GHz scatterometer backscatter data.
- Studying climate variability by tracking long-term trends in the gridded, 1-degree resolution annual salinity averages.
- Correcting for surface roughness effects in salinity retrieval algorithms using the collocated scatterometer ocean backscatter measurements.
Strengths
- Official end-of-mission public data release (version 5.0) ensuring final calibration.
- Provides data from three radiometers at 29, 38, and 46-degree incidence angles for multi-angle analysis.
- Combined active (1.26 GHz scatterometer) and passive (1.413 GHz radiometer) measurements for surface roughness correction.
Limitations
- Data collection ended with the mission; the last update was in 2015, limiting analysis to historical periods up to that date.
- Specific row counts, file sizes, and detailed column schema are unknown, complicating initial assessment of dataset scale and structure.
- Spatial resolution is 1 degree, which may be too coarse for studying fine-scale coastal or eddy processes.
Provenance
- Source
- NASA and Comision Nacional de Actividades Espaciales (CONAE) AQUARIUS/SAC-D mission.
- Collection Method
- Satellite remote sensing via three push-broom radiometers and a scatterometer onboard the AQUARIUS/SAC-D satellite.
- Time Range
- Annual aggregates covering the mission's operational period (exact years unknown).
- Freshness
- Historical dataset; last updated 2015-06-07.
- Geography
- Global ocean coverage with a 370 km cross-track swath from the satellite.