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A New Method to Filter Out
Radio-Frequency Interference (RFI)
from SMOS Level 1C Data for Sea Ice
Applications
Marcus Huntemann and Georg Heygster
Abstract The Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity (SMOS) satellite carries a passive
microwave radiometer working at 1.4 GHz (L-Band). A unique synthetic aperture
antenna consisting of several small antennas allows SMOS to observe a single
geographic location under various incidence angles within single over
ights. Here
we present a preprocessing method starting from SMOS Level 1C data for sea ice
applications which reduces the instrumental noise and
fl
filters radio frequency
interference while preserving valuable data better
than previously suggested
methods in cryospheric applications. The
filter employs binning on incidence
angles, so that the
filtered data can be used for comparison with surface emissivity
models or may serve as input to retrieval procedures.
1 Introduction
Microwave (MW) radiometers on-board satellites are important tools for observing
the ocean, atmosphere and cryosphere. For more than 40 years several MW radi-
ometers have been observing the earth, especially providing valuable information
on the sea ice cover. Since the beginning of 2010 the SMOS satellite has been
operational. Its payload, the Microwave Imaging Radiometer with Aperture Syn-
thesis Microwave Imaging Radiometer with Aperture Synthesis (MIRAS) extends
the existing MW radiometers to 1.4 GHz (L-band), the lowest microwave frequency
used for satellite passive microwave remote sensing so far. Even though the SMOS
satellite was engineered for remote sensing of soil moisture and ocean salinity
(name SMOS), its low frequency observations also carry information on the sea ice
properties like Sea Ice Thickness (SIT) (Huntemann et al.
2014
) and depth of the
snow cover (Maa
ß
et al.
2013
).
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