Sea Surface Salinity and Wind Speed Retrievals Using GNSS-R and L-Band Microwave Radiometry Data from FMPL-2 Onboard the FSSCat Mission

The Federated Satellite System mission (FSSCat), winner of the 2017 Copernicus Masters Competition and the first ESA third-party mission based on CubeSats, aimed to provide coarse-resolution soil moisture estimations and sea ice concentration maps by means of the passive microwave measurements collected by the Flexible Microwave Payload-2 (FMPL-2). The mission was successfully launched on 3 September 2020. In addition to the primary scientific objectives, FMPL-2 data are used in this study to estimate sea surface salinity (SSS), correcting for the sea surface roughness using a wind speed estimate from the L-band microwave radiometer and GNSS-R data themselves. FMPL-2 was executed over the Arctic and Antarctic oceans on a weekly schedule. Different artificial neural network algorithms have been implemented, combining FMPL-2 data with the sea surface temperature, showing a root-mean-square error (RMSE) down to 1.68 m/s in the case of the wind speed (WS) retrieval algorithms, and RMSE down to 0.43 psu for the sea surface salinity algorithm in one single pass.

Automated summary

The FSSCat mission, a winner of the Copernicus Masters Competition in 2017, was the first ESA third-party mission based on CubeSats with the aim of providing soil moisture and sea ice concentration information through passive microwave measurements. The study utilized FMPL-2 data for sea surface salinity estimation, achieving accurate wind speed and sea surface salinity estimates by combining FMPL-2 data with sea surface temperature using various artificial neural network algorithms.