Extended Ocean Salinity Error Budget Analysis within the SMOS Mission

The Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity mission will provide from 2009 onwards sea surface salinity maps over the oceans. In this paper an ocean salinity error budget is described. Instrumental, external noise sources and geophysical errors have been analysed, stressing their relative degree of impact. With the aim of improving this study, an extended version of this analysis provides an overall vision of the salinity retrieval in a wider set of configurations.