First Assessment of Salinity Retrieval for Airborne COSM Data

The Chinese Ocean Salinity Mission (COSM) is dedicated to the global sea surface salinity (SSS) using the interferometric aperture synthesis radiometry. The airborne COSM was conducted during July to August 2023 at Qixia of Shandong Province. The introduction of airborne COSM experiment and the pre-simulation results based on the design of airborne instruments, which are the scaled-down model of spaceborne payloads, are presented. The preliminary sea surface salinity (SSS) retrieval results show that, the best accuracy of SSS is achieved when considering all the available measurements from two payloads together in a combined retrieval. The results from the airborne COSM experiment verify the interferometric synthetic aperture payloads performance and will also help to improve the data processing technique and the key error correction methods in the future in-orbit operational phase.