Title: COST SMOS Mission Oceanographic Data Exploitation
Description: The overall goal targeted by the network is the synergy of the European efforts in the interpretation of the measurements and their applications, profiting from the imminent availability of SMOS data. This COST Action is coordinating European teams working on two major research areas. The first one focuses on the improvement and development of SMOS-derived data products. The second is assessing the added value of such products in operational oceanography, process and climate studies. This Action is the ideal framework to capitalize the often fragmented efforts of the identified experts working in these research areas.
Salinity is one of 45 Essential Climate Variables (ECV) identified by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) to monitor climate variability. However, in spite of the relevance of salinity in the oceanographic phenomena described above, there has been a lack of SSS observations over most of the world oceans. Only a small fraction of the ocean has been sampled on a regular basis, at least until the recent deployment of the Argo floats system and the launch of the SMOS mission.
This COST Action is coordinating pan-European scientists to compare and assess the various techniques being implemented nationally to retrieve salinity information from satellite data. It is expected it will help define, when possible, common protocols to avoid the proliferation of multiple salinity products arising from the same source of data.
Duration: 14/1/2011 – 31/1/2015
Website: http://www.smos-mode.eu/