CCI+SSS, A New SMOS L2 Reprocessing Reduces Errors on Sea Surface Salinity Time Series

The European Space Agency (ESA) Climate Change Initiative (CCI+) for Sea Surface Salinity (SSS) aims at generating global SSS fields from all available satellite L-band radiometer measurements over the longest possible period with a great stability (including Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity, SMOS). Version 1 and 2 of CCI+SSS level 4 fields combine SSS form the three satellite L-Band radiometer missions and have been found to be in a very good agreement with in situ measurements (global rms difference of 0,16 pss). Nevertheless, some systematic differences still remain between CCI+SSS and in situ SSS. We study here to which extent some errors coming from the SMOS SSS processing are reduced, when making some key changes in the SMOS level 2 OS processing. Then, we discuss the contribution of each change in the preliminary results we obtain.