The ocean as a calibration target to trim SMOS visibility denormalization errors

It has recently been found that the visibility denormalization process introduces a spatial error distribution due to small sporadic offset jumps in the PMS detectors. The radiometric impact of this error at system level is very low. However, due to the good performance of the SMOS instrument, a study has recently been conducted to evaluate the amplitude of such visibility errors and develop a mitigation technique. The main results of this study are summarized in this presentation