A Study of SMOS RFI Over North America

The European Space Agency's Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity (SMOS) mission has been providing L-band brightness temperature observations of the Earth since its launch in November 2009. Radio frequency interference (RFI) is clearly present in SMOS data, and RFI detection and mitigation are a challenging problem. Furthermore, the interferometric nature of SMOS observations can cause RFI artifacts in SMOS measurements. This letter reports an analysis of the characteristics of SMOS RFI in North America, including a study of RFI artifacts and a method for their removal. Polarimetric properties and statistics of the resulting observations after artifact removal are also examined as an initial step in characterizing the “true” RFI sources observed in North America.