From A. Supply
These results will be presented at the “Ocean Science meeting” in Session PL24A – Ocean Salinity in Support of Scientific and Environmental Demands.
Using 10 years worth of SMOS data, the authors have shown that they could monitor a number of events around the Arctic including the variability of the Beaufort Gyre during ice free periods, the river runoff in the Laptev Sea and Lena river plume, or in the Kara Sea and Ob’+Yenisei river plumes.
These results are very new and outstanding.
They also show the importance of long term monitoring with L-Band radiometry (hence a SMAP / SMOS follow on mission) as well as the crucial role of a fine spatial resolution (ideally better than SMOS/SMAP) to be able to track the gyres and plumes or the variability of Pacific Waters entry in the Arctic Ocean: a large difference of salinity is recorded in the Chukchi and East-Siberian sea between 2012 and 2015 for instance.